“Let us go, then, you and I.”
From “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
Going in Tanzania is mostly communal. A small bus bouncing on a rocky road groans with the weight of too many people packed elbow to cheek, cheek to cheek, stomach to chin. Men and women march together by the road balancing freight on their heads.
If people are not going, they are waiting, and their waiting becomes going.
One day I arrived at the college campus in Moshi Town expecting to teach at 8:00 a.m. and learned from students that the schedule had changed, that our classroom had changed, and now I had four hours to wait. I graded essays under the canvas roof of the makeshift canteen, situated on the only grass on campus, until my feet were so bitten by insects that I had to move. I needed to shop for Christmas gifts, and I had time. Going seemed to be the thing to do, but it meant some uncertainty. While I knew where the closest bus stand was, I did not know what bus to take to return back to the campus. When my colleague James stopped to ask me a question, I asked him for directions.
James is basically a snake in character, which isn’t being kind to snakes. In the past four conversations I’ve had with James, nothing he has said turned out to be true. At tea time once, he stopped our conversation abruptly to say he had a class to teach. Two minutes later I found him in the hallway of the administration building pacing outside an office. Another time, he had informed me that the new schedule for teaching was posted on the bulletin board. I found no such schedule.
But the real reason not to trust James had to do with a much earlier incident a couple months ago when I was having tea with a student worker. James came into the dining hall and reminded the student, Sarah, that as his African sister, she should serve him some tea. She did it. I asked James what he did for her as her brother. He came up with a good list and I asked him how many of those he had already done for her, which brought about a change in topic. At another tea time when he told the student again that he wanted her to serve him tea, I reminded him that he had a healthy set of arms and legs to serve himself. And then at another tea time, James walked to my table where I sat sipping tea and told me that since Sarah was not there to serve him, he would go out and find her. I knew then that James did not like me.
Last week I found out James would be my tutor for my seminars. This means I have to work with James. I will tell him what material he should cover with my students who will be grouped into sections much smaller than 160 students in my lectures. It also means that when James told me he had a master’s degree, he was lying because people with master’s degrees are lecturers, not tutors.
When I asked James what bus to take for the return from bus terminal to campus, I knew James would not recognize the truth if it struck him down. James’s instructions were long and tortuous, but when I started to write down place names he mentioned, the instructions became more focused: take a bus that says “Mbuyuni.”
To worry about whether James’s advice was good or not—that would’ve been a definite refusal to go for the ride.
At the bus terminal, I stopped and asked a man and woman seated on a bench where the Mbuyuni bus was. They pointed to the end of the terminal. Then the woman said a few words, some of which I understood: “wait” and “let’s go.”
She took me by the hand and led me across the street. The person who takes me by the hand, despite the sweat and dust of my fingers, is the one who wants me to find the way, the one who walks the distance in the hot sun to make sure that I have gotten what I asked for. This woman who took my grimy hand would not let go until we had crossed the street, until she had hailed the Mbuyuni bus, that is, the second Mbuyuni bus because the first one took off after briefly stopping for two seconds.
The bus traveled to the right section of town, but I did not see the Moshi Town campus anywhere. I saw the Tanzanian Breweries Limited factory near the Moshi Town campus. But I didn’t know what to ask for. Maybe the bus would arrive at a place that I would recognize. Soon enough, I was the only passenger, and the conductor said another word that I recognized: “mwisho,” “the end.” The end was a little subsection of Moshi with chickens and goats and a field of some crop I didn’t recognize and a road and shops that I didn’t recognize.
The conductor pointed to another bus headed in the opposite direction. I boarded it and after greeting a friendly woman beside me, I managed to ask about the Moshi Town campus. A man in the front seat seemed to know it and after the bus made its first stop, he told me to go with him. Though he did not take me by the hand, he led me through long passages between houses at a very fast clip, and after we managed to exhaust our foreign language supply, we walked at a fast clip in silence and burning sun. Suddenly the Moshi Town campus appeared. I was led once again by someone who merely said, “Let’s go.”
“Let us go, then, you and I” is a call to go to the unknown, to knowingly follow the advice of a snake, not with trust but out of the yearning to go. The call is also a hand that takes my grimy one because it wants me to go where it takes me. To answer the call is to discover what love is.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Cheated and blessed
Arusha is a big tourist city near Moshi. When I take the bus from Moshi to Arusha, I take a huge bus at the terminal where small and giant buses roar in and out, all of them blowing black smoke behind them. In the huge buses, there’s an aisle down the middle, and when seats are filled, middle seats are folded down. When those are filled, the conductor orders people to share the fold-down seat. Sometimes it’s done thoughtfully. That is, the conductor has taken into account the size of bottoms that need to share. Other times, the conductor has ordered two people with very large rumps to split a one-rump space. Usually the two passengers complain and figure out how to rearrange themselves, and everyone is mildly content.
Buses don’t follow a schedule as far as I can tell. I climb onto a bus, and when it is full, the bus departs. Time is not of the essence; money from passengers is. While the first passengers wait, vendors walk around with goods to sell: bottles of water, cookies, sunglasses, underpants—whatever can be carried over to a bus and thrust through a window.
A few weeks ago, I wanted a bottle of water, normally five hundred shillings, the equivalent of fifty cents. I handed the vendor a ten thousand bill. He left to get the correct change and when he returned, he handed me the bills and disappeared. I looked at the change, subtracted in my head, and realized I had just paid two thousand shillings, the equivalent of two dollars rather than fifty cents.
Local customers here are very savvy about any transaction. They scrutinize any shoe, any bucket, pushing and prodding at potential weak joints. They argue prices down, or they walk away in disgust. If I get a fair price out of anything, that’s because the Tanzanian standing with me has done all of the work. Or the merchant wants me to return for future business.
But these roaming vendors figure I won’t return. I’m on a bus, I’m clearly a tourist, and they can get away with taking an extra two thousand shillings. So I sat on the bus seat and stewed about being cheated, but only briefly. I was sitting on a bus after all, and the cheater had to work every day pushing his goods on people who mostly didn’t want to buy them.
About a week later, I took another ride to Arusha, boarding the huge bus. On the way, we stopped at the bus terminal in a nearby town called Boma. For reasons that remain a mystery, the bus to Arusha always stops at this terminal, and some official-looking person at the gate is handed money. In the meantime, while the bus waits in line before the gate, vendors swarm about us.
That day I decided I wanted a package of sweet cakes, which cost five hundred shillings, but I had only a thousand shilling bill. The vendor—who looked like a teenaged boy—shook a second package at me and gave a look of pleading, but I shook my head, I only wanted one package. As I handed him my bill, the bus started to roll. He slapped his packages onto the chest of the guy standing beside him, dug into his pockets, and jogged beside the bus. I hung my head out the window, and the bus shifted into second gear. The boy now shifted into a sprint. Just as I mentally let go of the five hundred shillings, he thrust a bill into my hands.
I poked my head out of the window even further. The boy stood behind a cloud of black exhaust, his body heaving with each breath. And I did the only thing I could do at that moment—I blew him a kiss.
Buses don’t follow a schedule as far as I can tell. I climb onto a bus, and when it is full, the bus departs. Time is not of the essence; money from passengers is. While the first passengers wait, vendors walk around with goods to sell: bottles of water, cookies, sunglasses, underpants—whatever can be carried over to a bus and thrust through a window.
A few weeks ago, I wanted a bottle of water, normally five hundred shillings, the equivalent of fifty cents. I handed the vendor a ten thousand bill. He left to get the correct change and when he returned, he handed me the bills and disappeared. I looked at the change, subtracted in my head, and realized I had just paid two thousand shillings, the equivalent of two dollars rather than fifty cents.
Local customers here are very savvy about any transaction. They scrutinize any shoe, any bucket, pushing and prodding at potential weak joints. They argue prices down, or they walk away in disgust. If I get a fair price out of anything, that’s because the Tanzanian standing with me has done all of the work. Or the merchant wants me to return for future business.
But these roaming vendors figure I won’t return. I’m on a bus, I’m clearly a tourist, and they can get away with taking an extra two thousand shillings. So I sat on the bus seat and stewed about being cheated, but only briefly. I was sitting on a bus after all, and the cheater had to work every day pushing his goods on people who mostly didn’t want to buy them.
About a week later, I took another ride to Arusha, boarding the huge bus. On the way, we stopped at the bus terminal in a nearby town called Boma. For reasons that remain a mystery, the bus to Arusha always stops at this terminal, and some official-looking person at the gate is handed money. In the meantime, while the bus waits in line before the gate, vendors swarm about us.
That day I decided I wanted a package of sweet cakes, which cost five hundred shillings, but I had only a thousand shilling bill. The vendor—who looked like a teenaged boy—shook a second package at me and gave a look of pleading, but I shook my head, I only wanted one package. As I handed him my bill, the bus started to roll. He slapped his packages onto the chest of the guy standing beside him, dug into his pockets, and jogged beside the bus. I hung my head out the window, and the bus shifted into second gear. The boy now shifted into a sprint. Just as I mentally let go of the five hundred shillings, he thrust a bill into my hands.
I poked my head out of the window even further. The boy stood behind a cloud of black exhaust, his body heaving with each breath. And I did the only thing I could do at that moment—I blew him a kiss.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
In spite of the dust
This morning, I am teaching Basic Communication Skills to at least 100 students at the Moshi Town campus of SMMUCo. The campus opened last week, a month after classes started.
Three buildings on this campus, a former brewery, are still being transformed from beer-making activity to learning activity: the administration building, the cafeteria/library/classroom building, and a large lecture hall. The other buildings have not been transformed at all. An architect has yet to inspect one building to see if it has potential to be a dormitory.
The streets in this area of Moshi are a fine powdery dust, with large manufacturing enterprises making up most of the activity. Large lorries barrel in and out, stirring up large clouds. The campus grounds are also the same powder. Workers shovel the makings of concrete. Others pound away at old concrete, throwing out more dust. The small act of walking stirs up small billows.
When I dressed this morning, I thought of wearing a handkerchief over my hair. I thought of wearing worn-out clothes that I could easily wash and wouldn’t worry about preserving. If I had goggles and a face mask, I could wear them also. I chose instead a simple wrinkle-free skirt and wrinkled blouse.
The large lecture hall where I teach looks more like an airplane hangar with at least two sides open to the air and sunshine and dust. A chapel service is still in progress when I arrive, so I sit in a seat and discover that there’s a fine layer of dust on the desk, and I imagine that my skirt has nicely removed a layer for the student who takes my place. The evangelist says a final prayer, and I move to the front of the class arrangement. I would call it a classroom but it’s more an island of desks and chairs in a sea of concrete floor, all of them facing a white board.
The white board still has the previous class’s lecture on it. As students begin to wipe off their seats and chairs, I wipe off the white board and realize that really I’m erasing two or three lectures underneath the current one, plus the latest layer of dust. Finally one kind student takes the eraser from me, moves just beyond the hangar, dips the eraser in a water puddle and returns to wipe off the board. Now the board has smeared into it a layer of puddle. Later a second volunteer student will take the eraser to a room in the next building and return with a cleaner, wetter eraser. That will wipe out three layers of letters. And by creating a film of blue and black gray, this latest smearing will give a nice contrast to my blue letters.
Very little can happen in an airplane hangar with over 100 students. Surely the last row cannot read my handwriting mixed with dust, three lectures, and puddle. Surely they cannot hear me shouting above the workers pounding in the unfinished building next to us. Surely the dust already clinging to their fingers, their pens, and papers drives them nuts. Surely they have better things to do than wait ten minutes for me to wipe off the board.
But they have come wearing their finest clothes, the men in pressed shirts and ties, the women in dresses and scarves. Somebody’s perfume wafts pleasantly from the front row.
I am telling them the parable of the talents because I have witnessed two weeks before a pathetic set of student presentations. I tell them that as future teachers, they will be given five bags of talents and they should understand how powerful and life-giving those bags are. Their focus in preparing these presentations should not be fear, but the importance of what they do.
And in saying this, I see them lean forward. Some of the students in the back have turned one ear toward me. After I finish telling the parable, I will begin a painstaking process of writing on the board a sample essay rather than giving them a handout because circumstances discourage me from making over a hundred photocopies. And they will write patiently. The students in back will occasionally stand up to get a better view of what I’ve written on the board. Other students will help the ones beside them by showing their notes. Someone will ask me to explain something again. And afterward, students will come to me with drafts of the next assignment even though I hadn’t finished explaining it.
Next Monday, I will take extra care in pressing my skirt in spite of the dust.
Three buildings on this campus, a former brewery, are still being transformed from beer-making activity to learning activity: the administration building, the cafeteria/library/classroom building, and a large lecture hall. The other buildings have not been transformed at all. An architect has yet to inspect one building to see if it has potential to be a dormitory.
The streets in this area of Moshi are a fine powdery dust, with large manufacturing enterprises making up most of the activity. Large lorries barrel in and out, stirring up large clouds. The campus grounds are also the same powder. Workers shovel the makings of concrete. Others pound away at old concrete, throwing out more dust. The small act of walking stirs up small billows.
When I dressed this morning, I thought of wearing a handkerchief over my hair. I thought of wearing worn-out clothes that I could easily wash and wouldn’t worry about preserving. If I had goggles and a face mask, I could wear them also. I chose instead a simple wrinkle-free skirt and wrinkled blouse.
The large lecture hall where I teach looks more like an airplane hangar with at least two sides open to the air and sunshine and dust. A chapel service is still in progress when I arrive, so I sit in a seat and discover that there’s a fine layer of dust on the desk, and I imagine that my skirt has nicely removed a layer for the student who takes my place. The evangelist says a final prayer, and I move to the front of the class arrangement. I would call it a classroom but it’s more an island of desks and chairs in a sea of concrete floor, all of them facing a white board.
The white board still has the previous class’s lecture on it. As students begin to wipe off their seats and chairs, I wipe off the white board and realize that really I’m erasing two or three lectures underneath the current one, plus the latest layer of dust. Finally one kind student takes the eraser from me, moves just beyond the hangar, dips the eraser in a water puddle and returns to wipe off the board. Now the board has smeared into it a layer of puddle. Later a second volunteer student will take the eraser to a room in the next building and return with a cleaner, wetter eraser. That will wipe out three layers of letters. And by creating a film of blue and black gray, this latest smearing will give a nice contrast to my blue letters.
Very little can happen in an airplane hangar with over 100 students. Surely the last row cannot read my handwriting mixed with dust, three lectures, and puddle. Surely they cannot hear me shouting above the workers pounding in the unfinished building next to us. Surely the dust already clinging to their fingers, their pens, and papers drives them nuts. Surely they have better things to do than wait ten minutes for me to wipe off the board.
But they have come wearing their finest clothes, the men in pressed shirts and ties, the women in dresses and scarves. Somebody’s perfume wafts pleasantly from the front row.
I am telling them the parable of the talents because I have witnessed two weeks before a pathetic set of student presentations. I tell them that as future teachers, they will be given five bags of talents and they should understand how powerful and life-giving those bags are. Their focus in preparing these presentations should not be fear, but the importance of what they do.
And in saying this, I see them lean forward. Some of the students in the back have turned one ear toward me. After I finish telling the parable, I will begin a painstaking process of writing on the board a sample essay rather than giving them a handout because circumstances discourage me from making over a hundred photocopies. And they will write patiently. The students in back will occasionally stand up to get a better view of what I’ve written on the board. Other students will help the ones beside them by showing their notes. Someone will ask me to explain something again. And afterward, students will come to me with drafts of the next assignment even though I hadn’t finished explaining it.
Next Monday, I will take extra care in pressing my skirt in spite of the dust.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Communication Failures
At SMMUCo, I teach Basic Communication Skills. Since failure is an excellent teacher, I assigned students the task of writing about a communication failure. Here are a few samples that I have modified and added fictional names and place names:
Poor eyesight
A Tanzanian man who worked in the States was contacted by his parents in Tanzania to send money. They needed it to pay the electricity bill which was about to be cut off. At the Western Union station in Tanzania, the parents read back the control number of the receipt to the agent, who told them the number was incorrect and sent them away. After they called their son again, they learned that due to their poor eyesight, they had misread an 8 for a 0. In the meantime, the electricity had been cut off, and the parents now sat in the dark, their poor eyesight reduced even more until the next day when they could return to Western Union with the correct number.
The daughter from Dar es Salaam
Mama Linda received a letter from her daughter Helda in Dar es Salaam, but she did not know how to read. She called upon her neighbor to read it. He then informed Mama Linda that her daughter in Dar had died. Soon Mama Linda’s granddaughter came home and found her grandmother sobbing. Now the granddaughter read the letter and discovered that the letter was announcing Helda would be coming to visit the following week. At this point, the neighbor confessed he too was illiterate.
Thief!
One night in the village of Kirima, a woman shouted, “Thief, thief!” Amani told his son to get up and help catch the thief. Other villagers appeared with sticks and long bush knives. The thief ran quickly but not quickly enough. Villagers soon gave him a royal beating until Amani persuaded them to stop by telling them that they should call the police. But when Amani called the police, they did not answer. When Amani tried again, his cell phone did not have enough battery charge in it and failed to make contact. Upon learning this, the fury of the villagers came upon them once again, and now they beat the thief to death. Having killed the thief, they turned on Amani who fled successfully.
Fire!
There was a fire accident at Majengo. The fire caused much loss because after the villagers called the fire extinguisher, the fire extinguisher was confused about the specific direction to reach the fire. Accordingly, the fire extinguisher used much time on the way to reach the fire, which caused some of the houses and all the property to be destroyed. It would be better for citizens to get different seminars on how they can overcome different accidents regarding their environment.
(Take note that the author has absolutely no confidence in giving a seminar to fire extinguishers.)
Poor eyesight
A Tanzanian man who worked in the States was contacted by his parents in Tanzania to send money. They needed it to pay the electricity bill which was about to be cut off. At the Western Union station in Tanzania, the parents read back the control number of the receipt to the agent, who told them the number was incorrect and sent them away. After they called their son again, they learned that due to their poor eyesight, they had misread an 8 for a 0. In the meantime, the electricity had been cut off, and the parents now sat in the dark, their poor eyesight reduced even more until the next day when they could return to Western Union with the correct number.
The daughter from Dar es Salaam
Mama Linda received a letter from her daughter Helda in Dar es Salaam, but she did not know how to read. She called upon her neighbor to read it. He then informed Mama Linda that her daughter in Dar had died. Soon Mama Linda’s granddaughter came home and found her grandmother sobbing. Now the granddaughter read the letter and discovered that the letter was announcing Helda would be coming to visit the following week. At this point, the neighbor confessed he too was illiterate.
Thief!
One night in the village of Kirima, a woman shouted, “Thief, thief!” Amani told his son to get up and help catch the thief. Other villagers appeared with sticks and long bush knives. The thief ran quickly but not quickly enough. Villagers soon gave him a royal beating until Amani persuaded them to stop by telling them that they should call the police. But when Amani called the police, they did not answer. When Amani tried again, his cell phone did not have enough battery charge in it and failed to make contact. Upon learning this, the fury of the villagers came upon them once again, and now they beat the thief to death. Having killed the thief, they turned on Amani who fled successfully.
Fire!
There was a fire accident at Majengo. The fire caused much loss because after the villagers called the fire extinguisher, the fire extinguisher was confused about the specific direction to reach the fire. Accordingly, the fire extinguisher used much time on the way to reach the fire, which caused some of the houses and all the property to be destroyed. It would be better for citizens to get different seminars on how they can overcome different accidents regarding their environment.
(Take note that the author has absolutely no confidence in giving a seminar to fire extinguishers.)
Sunday, November 15, 2009
A Passport
This past Sunday I went with Happy, the bursar’s assistant at SMMUCo, and her sister Neema to church. Since it’s impossible to pretend I’m not a visitor, Happy accurately anticipated that I would be asked to introduce myself, as is the custom. But my nickname at Happy’s home is “Sija elewa” which means “I don’t understand.” At times Happy, with hands wringing, announces it’ll take me ten years to learn Swahili.
On the walk to church at 6:45 a.m. Happy reminded me of key phrases I would need. Since I was familiar with these phrases, I rehearsed them a few times mentally, a few times out loud, got them wrong, and Happy corrected me. In a few more steps, Happy led us into the front of the church, five inches from the pulpit. I looked back and saw 400 people facing me.
After the sermon, the congregation filed to the front to give their offering. At this point, the pastor seated at Happy’s right called her over for a five-minute conversation. Happy returned to report that the pastor wanted me to introduce myself. He did not know enough English to help me, and so the two of them decided I would do it myself, but only briefly. The briefly part was Happy’s idea.
I had spent the length of the hour sermon picking out words I recognized, much like chasing butterflies. Neema had brought an English New Testament, so at least I could get the gospel for the day. So when the pastor invited guests to stand up, my only clue was the word “wageni” and the fact that he now stared at me. I stood up, faced the sea of 400 and performed three sentences, mixed with English prepositions, all with confidence. The congregation applauded enthusiastically. As soon as I sat down, Happy let out the air that her lungs held during my three sentences and then collapsed in my lap.
All of that had been thoughtfully orchestrated by Happy. She had helped me rehearse to the point that I was confident when the time came. And she had made it possible for me to reach a congregation who were truly pleased and grateful that I had managed to say something to them in their own language. Maybe it seems like a pocket-sized gesture, but multiply that times 400, and it opens up a whole world.
On the walk to church at 6:45 a.m. Happy reminded me of key phrases I would need. Since I was familiar with these phrases, I rehearsed them a few times mentally, a few times out loud, got them wrong, and Happy corrected me. In a few more steps, Happy led us into the front of the church, five inches from the pulpit. I looked back and saw 400 people facing me.
After the sermon, the congregation filed to the front to give their offering. At this point, the pastor seated at Happy’s right called her over for a five-minute conversation. Happy returned to report that the pastor wanted me to introduce myself. He did not know enough English to help me, and so the two of them decided I would do it myself, but only briefly. The briefly part was Happy’s idea.
I had spent the length of the hour sermon picking out words I recognized, much like chasing butterflies. Neema had brought an English New Testament, so at least I could get the gospel for the day. So when the pastor invited guests to stand up, my only clue was the word “wageni” and the fact that he now stared at me. I stood up, faced the sea of 400 and performed three sentences, mixed with English prepositions, all with confidence. The congregation applauded enthusiastically. As soon as I sat down, Happy let out the air that her lungs held during my three sentences and then collapsed in my lap.
All of that had been thoughtfully orchestrated by Happy. She had helped me rehearse to the point that I was confident when the time came. And she had made it possible for me to reach a congregation who were truly pleased and grateful that I had managed to say something to them in their own language. Maybe it seems like a pocket-sized gesture, but multiply that times 400, and it opens up a whole world.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Clawing hands that pull you down
At tea time, I sat next to Mama Nasari the other day, not necessarily because we could say a whole lot to each other. My Swahili has not moved beyond basic caveman gruntings. Rather, I sat beside her because I learned a few weeks ago that she is envious of the women who have socialized with me at tea time since I arrived in August. These are secretaries, like Mama Nasari, who were part of daily life on campus when no faculty or students were around. At that time, Mama Nasari was on leave and, upon returning, found that others had developed friendships with me as well as greater ease in speaking English.
One day I listened to some of them encourage her to speak with me. But, she said, she felt foolish speaking broken English. Yes, they admitted, and so did they, yet no one made fun of them, and it was more important just to practice speaking English, broken though it was. You can’t get past broken to whole without the broken part. And, they pointed out, one could observe my own enthusiastic Swahili gruntings.
A few conversational topics later, Mama Nasari told me she wanted to learn Excel. I said I could teach her quickly in a half hour, maybe at the beginning of the day. No, she said, that wouldn’t work, she’s too busy at the office. What about after tea? No, she’s too busy, too many interruptions. She suggested I come to her home on a Saturday. I could take the bus, and she has a computer.
Using the bus requires waiting a half hour up to an hour. And then a half hour ride to the bus stand near Mama Nasari, and then a little walk to her housing compound. This seemed a little extreme to me for a half hour lesson on Excel, but I said nothing.
Tea ended and Mama Alfa, who runs the internet café, followed me out apparently with an ulterior motive. As we walked farther away from the administration building, she explained that the real problem was that if I taught Mama Nasari at the college, the other secretaries would criticize her for trying to rise above the rest.
I have seen only glimpses of this in action, but it has incredible power among a group of people who are miserable. Women here are second-class citizens in many ways. I don’t know how it’s fostered exactly but I do know that all of the administrative leadership at SMMUCo is comprised of men. Of the faculty, the large majority is men. And those who serve at the socially lower ranks are women. Men seem to enjoy a freedom from criticism. In a marriage, a woman is expected to serve the husband and not the other way around. A man will leave his wife in his rural village home to care for his parents while he takes a job and a mistress or second wife in a big city.
I do not know how prevalent this is, but it is prevalent enough to have dug a deep pit of misery for women. This misery is intensified when others try to get out of the pit.
Education can be a powerful tool in raising the status of women. But the woman who sacrifices to save for a refrigerator or an education falls prey to the criticism of other women. While women can mouth words of encouragement, they are also capable of dragging another back down. Mama Nasari is therefore terrified of those who will claw at her with words.
After telling me of Mama Nasari’s fear, Mama Alfa turned to me and said, “So what will you do?” I can and will help Mama Nasari learn Excel. I can and will take the bus on a Saturday. But I do not know if my help will give her what she really needs: the courage to rise out of the pit. Each time she allows her fear of petty criticism to pull her down, the fear itself accumulates power and so do the clawing hands.
Mama Nasari could use a prayer for courage and a lesson on Excel. Hopefully the lesson can become another lesson on refusing to give in to clawing hands from the deep pit of misery.
One day I listened to some of them encourage her to speak with me. But, she said, she felt foolish speaking broken English. Yes, they admitted, and so did they, yet no one made fun of them, and it was more important just to practice speaking English, broken though it was. You can’t get past broken to whole without the broken part. And, they pointed out, one could observe my own enthusiastic Swahili gruntings.
A few conversational topics later, Mama Nasari told me she wanted to learn Excel. I said I could teach her quickly in a half hour, maybe at the beginning of the day. No, she said, that wouldn’t work, she’s too busy at the office. What about after tea? No, she’s too busy, too many interruptions. She suggested I come to her home on a Saturday. I could take the bus, and she has a computer.
Using the bus requires waiting a half hour up to an hour. And then a half hour ride to the bus stand near Mama Nasari, and then a little walk to her housing compound. This seemed a little extreme to me for a half hour lesson on Excel, but I said nothing.
Tea ended and Mama Alfa, who runs the internet café, followed me out apparently with an ulterior motive. As we walked farther away from the administration building, she explained that the real problem was that if I taught Mama Nasari at the college, the other secretaries would criticize her for trying to rise above the rest.
I have seen only glimpses of this in action, but it has incredible power among a group of people who are miserable. Women here are second-class citizens in many ways. I don’t know how it’s fostered exactly but I do know that all of the administrative leadership at SMMUCo is comprised of men. Of the faculty, the large majority is men. And those who serve at the socially lower ranks are women. Men seem to enjoy a freedom from criticism. In a marriage, a woman is expected to serve the husband and not the other way around. A man will leave his wife in his rural village home to care for his parents while he takes a job and a mistress or second wife in a big city.
I do not know how prevalent this is, but it is prevalent enough to have dug a deep pit of misery for women. This misery is intensified when others try to get out of the pit.
Education can be a powerful tool in raising the status of women. But the woman who sacrifices to save for a refrigerator or an education falls prey to the criticism of other women. While women can mouth words of encouragement, they are also capable of dragging another back down. Mama Nasari is therefore terrified of those who will claw at her with words.
After telling me of Mama Nasari’s fear, Mama Alfa turned to me and said, “So what will you do?” I can and will help Mama Nasari learn Excel. I can and will take the bus on a Saturday. But I do not know if my help will give her what she really needs: the courage to rise out of the pit. Each time she allows her fear of petty criticism to pull her down, the fear itself accumulates power and so do the clawing hands.
Mama Nasari could use a prayer for courage and a lesson on Excel. Hopefully the lesson can become another lesson on refusing to give in to clawing hands from the deep pit of misery.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Cutting a cake
My African friends here have difficulty believing I can do anything practical. I cannot carry a bucket of water on my head. I do not chop wood for the fire to cook with. I do not mop my own floors (the cleaning staff does it). I do not cook since I don’t have a kitchen. Mostly they’ve observed that I read and write. So when I announced that I knew how to bake bread and a cake, they double-dared me to teach them.
Baking bread and a cake seemed possible here at the college because it has a degree program in Hotel and Tourism Industry, which comes with a classroom full of ovens, stoves, and sinks. Unlike this very convenient set-up, many or most kitchens in the homes here are nomadic. The charcoal or wood-burning container travels from inside to outside as does the cooking pan that rests on top of it. The water is already outside, having been carried by a member of the family from the nearest outdoor tap. And when the meal is over and the dishes are cleaned, all of that moves back inside.
The regular kitchen staff here at the College also work in a large kitchen with plenty of electric stoves (no ovens), but with the frequent power outages, the staff continue to use charcoal burners outside to fry donuts, cook rice, etc.
The three of us—Rehema, Mama Catherine, and I—planned to do the baking on a Saturday when the classroom was free. But we all understood that the plan would only work if God willed it. I’m beginning to understand this. Getting the ingredients for bread and cake was a challenge. I carried sacks with two bags of flour, sugar, baking power, yeast, vanilla on a bus so crowded that I did not have room to carry the bags where I stood, wedged between a hip and a stomach. As is the custom, a polite seated passenger carried the 20-pound bag on her lap, and after 30 minutes, with a deep groan she passed it on to me as I squeezed out of the bus. That was the first grocery shopping trip. The second shopping trip, I was lucky—a bus seat was open.
The key to the classroom was in the hands of a student named Doris, but on Saturday at the appointed time, Doris was nowhere to be found. After texting her on my cell phone, I learned she’d had a family emergency and had to be away. She had arranged for another student to unlock the kitchen.
Then the bus that brought Rehema to campus broke down somewhere after Moshi Town. After an hour of waiting for the bus not to be repaired, Rehema boarded another bus and arrived a half hour after that.
At the classroom kitchen, the Rehema, Mama Catherine and I found an electric mixer, pans, bowls, mixing spoons and more. I texted Doris to ask where the measuring cups and spoons were. Doris texted back to explain that they only measured using a scale, and so I returned to my apartment to find other possibilities. I decided that one of my coffee cups was about the same size as a measuring cup by imagining a measuring cup, something I haven’t seen in three months, and comparing it to the cup in front of my eyes. It seemed close enough to me. So did the non-measuring spoon that I used for stirring tea.
Back in the kitchen, the first step for the bread was to melt butter with milk, sugar and water in a saucepan, but none of the stoves would offer any heat after I turned, pushed, and pulled knobs. Once again, Doris came to the rescue long distance by asking a fellow student to help. The student appeared, turned on a button behind the stove, and soon we were heating up butter, milk, and water.
After finishing the bread dough, we started making the cake. The first step was to cream the shortening with the electric mixer. The electricity went out just as Rehema plopped the butter in the bowl. My mind suddenly moved forward twenty steps to the part where we actually needed to bake the bread and cake. At that moment, I saw everything falling apart.
Rehema saw all of the things falling apart in my mind and announced loudly that we would continue and worry about the baking part later. Really, we had what we needed at the moment: two women accustomed to chopping wood and carrying water who could whip the hard butter into fluffy cream, no problem. After a half hour of whipping, it was good.
At that point, Nickson showed up. Nickson is a third-year student here at SMMUCo who wants to be a gospel rap singer in the States. His first week here, he asked me if I would give him lessons in English to prepare him for his career, and he has faithfully appeared every week. He is the rare kind of student who asks twenty more questions than the teacher. Nickson reviewed the recipe and wanted to know the definitions of “shortening,” “beat,” “yeast,” and so on. Plus each word reminded him of something else he’d always wondered about.
Before we succeeded in throwing Nickson out, we’d arrived at the moment when baking was imminent and electricity was not. Someone who shall not be named said that if the American (Jeanne) went to Mlay, the security guard, and asked to turn on the generator, he would do it. But I did not want to ask for the generator. It’s extremely expensive, and the College struggles to make ends meet. But the shadows were lengthening, Rehema needed to be home before dark, and we’d done so much to arrive at this point.
Nickson accompanied me to translate. Mlay said we had to ask the campus manager. Then he would find Kimbori, another security guard, to turn on the generator.
Getting deeper into unethical waters, I went back to the kitchen to make sure that this request was really worth pursuing.
Absolutely, this was important. I was teaching. Wasn’t teaching how to make a cake important? If it wasn’t important, why had I worked so hard to get there?
I made Nickson go with me to the campus manager’s house, even though the campus manager speaks fluent English. The campus manager was eating dinner with his family and graciously invited me to join his family six times. But when I asked permission to have the generator turned on for one hour, his enthusiasm fizzled. Reluctantly he agreed, and off I went with Nickson, wondering how I would pay for this misdeed. When we returned to the security guard’s station, Mlay was nowhere to be found, Kimbori was off in the village, and so we left a message with the only person there, a student worker.
By now the bread had risen well above the loaf pans, and I punched it down, and it seemed a good time to eat at the dining hall. Through the dining hall windows, I could see Kimbori walk into the maintenance building to turn on the generator after I’d taken three bites of food. I zipped back to the kitchen to heat up the oven.
Both the bread and cake needed to be baked at 375°F. The oven knob had numbers 1-11, most of them faded or invisible. I turned the knob to the random number of 8, zipped back to finish my dinner, and after returning, decided 8 wasn’t hot enough and moved the knob to 11.
Not surprisingly the heat was uneven, and both the cake and the bread developed black blobs on top. Several times during the baking, we shifted pans. The public electricity returned after an hour of expensive generator power. As we pulled the bread and cake from the oven, fully cooked with black blobs on top, we declared it all to be good especially after tasting the layers underneath.
And then it was time to cut the cake. We cut a piece for Kimbori and Mlay who caused the generator to turn on. We cut pieces for the campus manager, his wife and two children. We cut a piece for Doris, one for Nickson. We cut a piece for Esther who had saved us food from the dining hall. We cut some for Rehema’s family and Mama Catherine’s family, one for me. The cake was now totally claimed by all who had helped to make it work, not including the bus drivers and the one passenger who had to carry my 20-pound bags of groceries, or the student who turned on the stove for us. We also excluded the fifty or so students who walked past the kitchen all afternoon, stared at the cake I carried to the various people around campus.
I have now accepted an invitation to teach the same lesson again (God willing), this time using the charcoal stove with a closed box that serves as an oven. If I can get an oven to bake bread at the temperature of number 11, I can surely make a box over charcoal do the equivalent. I also have the comfort of knowing that if the electricity goes out, we will not have to resort to unethical means.
Baking bread and a cake seemed possible here at the college because it has a degree program in Hotel and Tourism Industry, which comes with a classroom full of ovens, stoves, and sinks. Unlike this very convenient set-up, many or most kitchens in the homes here are nomadic. The charcoal or wood-burning container travels from inside to outside as does the cooking pan that rests on top of it. The water is already outside, having been carried by a member of the family from the nearest outdoor tap. And when the meal is over and the dishes are cleaned, all of that moves back inside.
The regular kitchen staff here at the College also work in a large kitchen with plenty of electric stoves (no ovens), but with the frequent power outages, the staff continue to use charcoal burners outside to fry donuts, cook rice, etc.
The three of us—Rehema, Mama Catherine, and I—planned to do the baking on a Saturday when the classroom was free. But we all understood that the plan would only work if God willed it. I’m beginning to understand this. Getting the ingredients for bread and cake was a challenge. I carried sacks with two bags of flour, sugar, baking power, yeast, vanilla on a bus so crowded that I did not have room to carry the bags where I stood, wedged between a hip and a stomach. As is the custom, a polite seated passenger carried the 20-pound bag on her lap, and after 30 minutes, with a deep groan she passed it on to me as I squeezed out of the bus. That was the first grocery shopping trip. The second shopping trip, I was lucky—a bus seat was open.
The key to the classroom was in the hands of a student named Doris, but on Saturday at the appointed time, Doris was nowhere to be found. After texting her on my cell phone, I learned she’d had a family emergency and had to be away. She had arranged for another student to unlock the kitchen.
Then the bus that brought Rehema to campus broke down somewhere after Moshi Town. After an hour of waiting for the bus not to be repaired, Rehema boarded another bus and arrived a half hour after that.
At the classroom kitchen, the Rehema, Mama Catherine and I found an electric mixer, pans, bowls, mixing spoons and more. I texted Doris to ask where the measuring cups and spoons were. Doris texted back to explain that they only measured using a scale, and so I returned to my apartment to find other possibilities. I decided that one of my coffee cups was about the same size as a measuring cup by imagining a measuring cup, something I haven’t seen in three months, and comparing it to the cup in front of my eyes. It seemed close enough to me. So did the non-measuring spoon that I used for stirring tea.
Back in the kitchen, the first step for the bread was to melt butter with milk, sugar and water in a saucepan, but none of the stoves would offer any heat after I turned, pushed, and pulled knobs. Once again, Doris came to the rescue long distance by asking a fellow student to help. The student appeared, turned on a button behind the stove, and soon we were heating up butter, milk, and water.
After finishing the bread dough, we started making the cake. The first step was to cream the shortening with the electric mixer. The electricity went out just as Rehema plopped the butter in the bowl. My mind suddenly moved forward twenty steps to the part where we actually needed to bake the bread and cake. At that moment, I saw everything falling apart.
Rehema saw all of the things falling apart in my mind and announced loudly that we would continue and worry about the baking part later. Really, we had what we needed at the moment: two women accustomed to chopping wood and carrying water who could whip the hard butter into fluffy cream, no problem. After a half hour of whipping, it was good.
At that point, Nickson showed up. Nickson is a third-year student here at SMMUCo who wants to be a gospel rap singer in the States. His first week here, he asked me if I would give him lessons in English to prepare him for his career, and he has faithfully appeared every week. He is the rare kind of student who asks twenty more questions than the teacher. Nickson reviewed the recipe and wanted to know the definitions of “shortening,” “beat,” “yeast,” and so on. Plus each word reminded him of something else he’d always wondered about.
Before we succeeded in throwing Nickson out, we’d arrived at the moment when baking was imminent and electricity was not. Someone who shall not be named said that if the American (Jeanne) went to Mlay, the security guard, and asked to turn on the generator, he would do it. But I did not want to ask for the generator. It’s extremely expensive, and the College struggles to make ends meet. But the shadows were lengthening, Rehema needed to be home before dark, and we’d done so much to arrive at this point.
Nickson accompanied me to translate. Mlay said we had to ask the campus manager. Then he would find Kimbori, another security guard, to turn on the generator.
Getting deeper into unethical waters, I went back to the kitchen to make sure that this request was really worth pursuing.
Absolutely, this was important. I was teaching. Wasn’t teaching how to make a cake important? If it wasn’t important, why had I worked so hard to get there?
I made Nickson go with me to the campus manager’s house, even though the campus manager speaks fluent English. The campus manager was eating dinner with his family and graciously invited me to join his family six times. But when I asked permission to have the generator turned on for one hour, his enthusiasm fizzled. Reluctantly he agreed, and off I went with Nickson, wondering how I would pay for this misdeed. When we returned to the security guard’s station, Mlay was nowhere to be found, Kimbori was off in the village, and so we left a message with the only person there, a student worker.
By now the bread had risen well above the loaf pans, and I punched it down, and it seemed a good time to eat at the dining hall. Through the dining hall windows, I could see Kimbori walk into the maintenance building to turn on the generator after I’d taken three bites of food. I zipped back to the kitchen to heat up the oven.
Both the bread and cake needed to be baked at 375°F. The oven knob had numbers 1-11, most of them faded or invisible. I turned the knob to the random number of 8, zipped back to finish my dinner, and after returning, decided 8 wasn’t hot enough and moved the knob to 11.
Not surprisingly the heat was uneven, and both the cake and the bread developed black blobs on top. Several times during the baking, we shifted pans. The public electricity returned after an hour of expensive generator power. As we pulled the bread and cake from the oven, fully cooked with black blobs on top, we declared it all to be good especially after tasting the layers underneath.
And then it was time to cut the cake. We cut a piece for Kimbori and Mlay who caused the generator to turn on. We cut pieces for the campus manager, his wife and two children. We cut a piece for Doris, one for Nickson. We cut a piece for Esther who had saved us food from the dining hall. We cut some for Rehema’s family and Mama Catherine’s family, one for me. The cake was now totally claimed by all who had helped to make it work, not including the bus drivers and the one passenger who had to carry my 20-pound bags of groceries, or the student who turned on the stove for us. We also excluded the fifty or so students who walked past the kitchen all afternoon, stared at the cake I carried to the various people around campus.
I have now accepted an invitation to teach the same lesson again (God willing), this time using the charcoal stove with a closed box that serves as an oven. If I can get an oven to bake bread at the temperature of number 11, I can surely make a box over charcoal do the equivalent. I also have the comfort of knowing that if the electricity goes out, we will not have to resort to unethical means.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
A Slippery but Insistent Hand
In the book of Matthew, chapter 5, Jesus delivers a series of laws that aren’t particularly pleasant, one of which is, “Give to him who begs from you.”
When Jesus wants to dish out a nuanced message, he serves the finest. In the parable of the talents, he tells the guy who buries his talent in the ground, “For to everyone who has, more will be given, but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” If someone has nothing, how can you take anything more away? Clearly the message here plumbs well beyond earthly laws of cause and effect, adding and subtracting. And that’s the nuanced message.
The law about giving is glaring sunlight in its simplicity. Jesus doesn’t say, “Give only to the people who will actually improve their lives with the money that you give them.” He doesn’t say, “Don’t give to the guy whose breath registers a blood alcohol level that’s lethal even just to smell it.”
Every time I take a walk in the village of Masoka, I am asked for money. Little children yell, “Mzungu! How are you, Madam? Geeva me mahney!” Old women point to their stomachs, then mouths and put out their palms. One woman grabbed my hand and refused to let go until I tore it away. If that woman could speak English, she could give a message as simple as Christ’s: “You’ve got money, I don’t, that’s not fair. Now make up for it by giving me what you’ve got in your pocket.”
That woman would be simply correct. Is that what Jesus meant with “Give to those who beg of you”? Here’s what I know: giving out of a sense of guilt doesn’t make me feel expansive toward anyone, let alone love.
I once asked Happy, the bursar’s assistant at SMMUCo, if she ever gave to the people sitting or lying on the sidewalk in Moshi Town begging for money. For these people, their disability is visible: eyes that are milky white, legs missing or misshapen. Happy said if she happened to have some coins, she put them in the cup provided.
But very simply, I do not have the money to make a meaningful difference in the lives of the people on the sidewalk or those yanking my arm. Yet, guilt doesn’t make me feel expansive toward anyone. Yet, I have; they don’t, and Christ said I should give.
Perhaps the simple command isn’t meant to even out any unfairness. At some point, I had the idea that when I took a walk in the village, I could bring some coins with me, like the offering I take to church. I had five coins. I had no idea who I would give to until the young guy came along with three friends asking for money for a drink. I didn’t ask a drink of what, I just gave. Then there was a child who wanted my mahney. Then there was the man with the bullhorn who advertised some local political meeting. I came up from behind him, and as he saw me, he hollered through the bullhorn, “Ah, Mzungu! Karibu!” (European! Welcome!) As we walked together, he asked (without the bullhorn) if I had money for a soda. His throat was dry. I gave him my last two coins, and he told me it wasn’t enough to buy a soda. He was very forgiving when I told him that was all I had left. We visited a little while. My two coins gave him no soda, no reversal of fortune. There was just the dust of the road and the rest of the walk home.
I’m not sure Christ’s simple sentence always means money either. On a walk through the village of Masoka, I met up with a gazillion children walking home from school. They rushed to greet me and then said, “Geeva me mahney.” Even if I had mahney, I didn’t have enough to divide a gazillion ways, but that didn’t discourage any of them, and they turned to walk beside me, shoulders and heads surrounding me. I struggled to find a place in the road to set my feet with each step, but gradually we found our stride as a swarming, walking whole. I also had nowhere to put my hands, and so I took the two hands half an inch from mine already and held them. Since I had no Swahili sentences to utter and they’d already run out of their English ones, we walked in silence.
Soon a bus came, and we all ran to the banana trees for cover. After the bus passed by, we searched for each other as the dust settled. The two girls whose hands I held before now took my hands again, as though it were their rightful place. Occasionally the hands would slip from sweat, but they would not let go. I wonder, who did the giving?
Here in Tanzania, I watch people give without being asked to do so, saving the recipient the indignity of having to ask. It’s simply an act of compassion.
I sat with Happy one day at the security gate while she waited for students to register. The guard brought us both overloaded plates of food. Happy had been watching a girl just outside the gate selling bananas. She hadn’t eaten all day, and now Happy scraped some of her food onto another plate. The girl refused the food three times, but when the food was set before her, she ate.
For Happy, giving is a daily practice as ordinary as breathing. And yet it allowed her to see the girl’s need. I only understood this when I went to visit Happy at her home. Of her family, I knew she lived with her mother and a sister. When I sat down to eat, the neighbor boy was called to the table. He seemed to know exactly where he stood in the pecking order: after Mama Happy, after Happy, after Happy’s sister Neema, and definitely after me. But the family made sure he ate, and he was included in the conversation. I found out later that he regularly ate with the family because his stepfather was abusive. Since Social Services isn’t an option, he found a sanctuary in Happy’s household.
Later, another young woman arrived and helped herself to food—Happy’s cousin Dora. When Dora’s parents became disabled with AIDS, Happy’s mother brought her and her twin sister into the home when they were two years old. Mama Happy worked a very small shop selling basic goods, but she journeyed to Dar es Salaam to collect the girls and provide for them indefinitely in spite of an income that would not have been enough to support three or four children. At age 20, Dora is now finishing her last year of secondary school. (Her twin returned to the parents when she was five.) I have not met a household that didn’t have extra children or relatives folded into their lives, and I can only wonder whether they ask themselves if they have enough income and space in the home to do so.
Like the affection of a child that seeps through a slippery but insistent hand, the command to give is simple yet loaded with mystery. The complexity waits to be discovered by the Christian pilgrim in daily life with daily giving.
And while I can only make up answers about what Christ was thinking or intended, I do have the certainty of plentiful opportunities to give, I have an unnuanced command from Christ, and I look at giants everywhere who give as though it were simply the folding of a hand into another.
When Jesus wants to dish out a nuanced message, he serves the finest. In the parable of the talents, he tells the guy who buries his talent in the ground, “For to everyone who has, more will be given, but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” If someone has nothing, how can you take anything more away? Clearly the message here plumbs well beyond earthly laws of cause and effect, adding and subtracting. And that’s the nuanced message.
The law about giving is glaring sunlight in its simplicity. Jesus doesn’t say, “Give only to the people who will actually improve their lives with the money that you give them.” He doesn’t say, “Don’t give to the guy whose breath registers a blood alcohol level that’s lethal even just to smell it.”
Every time I take a walk in the village of Masoka, I am asked for money. Little children yell, “Mzungu! How are you, Madam? Geeva me mahney!” Old women point to their stomachs, then mouths and put out their palms. One woman grabbed my hand and refused to let go until I tore it away. If that woman could speak English, she could give a message as simple as Christ’s: “You’ve got money, I don’t, that’s not fair. Now make up for it by giving me what you’ve got in your pocket.”
That woman would be simply correct. Is that what Jesus meant with “Give to those who beg of you”? Here’s what I know: giving out of a sense of guilt doesn’t make me feel expansive toward anyone, let alone love.
I once asked Happy, the bursar’s assistant at SMMUCo, if she ever gave to the people sitting or lying on the sidewalk in Moshi Town begging for money. For these people, their disability is visible: eyes that are milky white, legs missing or misshapen. Happy said if she happened to have some coins, she put them in the cup provided.
But very simply, I do not have the money to make a meaningful difference in the lives of the people on the sidewalk or those yanking my arm. Yet, guilt doesn’t make me feel expansive toward anyone. Yet, I have; they don’t, and Christ said I should give.
Perhaps the simple command isn’t meant to even out any unfairness. At some point, I had the idea that when I took a walk in the village, I could bring some coins with me, like the offering I take to church. I had five coins. I had no idea who I would give to until the young guy came along with three friends asking for money for a drink. I didn’t ask a drink of what, I just gave. Then there was a child who wanted my mahney. Then there was the man with the bullhorn who advertised some local political meeting. I came up from behind him, and as he saw me, he hollered through the bullhorn, “Ah, Mzungu! Karibu!” (European! Welcome!) As we walked together, he asked (without the bullhorn) if I had money for a soda. His throat was dry. I gave him my last two coins, and he told me it wasn’t enough to buy a soda. He was very forgiving when I told him that was all I had left. We visited a little while. My two coins gave him no soda, no reversal of fortune. There was just the dust of the road and the rest of the walk home.
I’m not sure Christ’s simple sentence always means money either. On a walk through the village of Masoka, I met up with a gazillion children walking home from school. They rushed to greet me and then said, “Geeva me mahney.” Even if I had mahney, I didn’t have enough to divide a gazillion ways, but that didn’t discourage any of them, and they turned to walk beside me, shoulders and heads surrounding me. I struggled to find a place in the road to set my feet with each step, but gradually we found our stride as a swarming, walking whole. I also had nowhere to put my hands, and so I took the two hands half an inch from mine already and held them. Since I had no Swahili sentences to utter and they’d already run out of their English ones, we walked in silence.
Soon a bus came, and we all ran to the banana trees for cover. After the bus passed by, we searched for each other as the dust settled. The two girls whose hands I held before now took my hands again, as though it were their rightful place. Occasionally the hands would slip from sweat, but they would not let go. I wonder, who did the giving?
Here in Tanzania, I watch people give without being asked to do so, saving the recipient the indignity of having to ask. It’s simply an act of compassion.
I sat with Happy one day at the security gate while she waited for students to register. The guard brought us both overloaded plates of food. Happy had been watching a girl just outside the gate selling bananas. She hadn’t eaten all day, and now Happy scraped some of her food onto another plate. The girl refused the food three times, but when the food was set before her, she ate.
For Happy, giving is a daily practice as ordinary as breathing. And yet it allowed her to see the girl’s need. I only understood this when I went to visit Happy at her home. Of her family, I knew she lived with her mother and a sister. When I sat down to eat, the neighbor boy was called to the table. He seemed to know exactly where he stood in the pecking order: after Mama Happy, after Happy, after Happy’s sister Neema, and definitely after me. But the family made sure he ate, and he was included in the conversation. I found out later that he regularly ate with the family because his stepfather was abusive. Since Social Services isn’t an option, he found a sanctuary in Happy’s household.
Later, another young woman arrived and helped herself to food—Happy’s cousin Dora. When Dora’s parents became disabled with AIDS, Happy’s mother brought her and her twin sister into the home when they were two years old. Mama Happy worked a very small shop selling basic goods, but she journeyed to Dar es Salaam to collect the girls and provide for them indefinitely in spite of an income that would not have been enough to support three or four children. At age 20, Dora is now finishing her last year of secondary school. (Her twin returned to the parents when she was five.) I have not met a household that didn’t have extra children or relatives folded into their lives, and I can only wonder whether they ask themselves if they have enough income and space in the home to do so.
Like the affection of a child that seeps through a slippery but insistent hand, the command to give is simple yet loaded with mystery. The complexity waits to be discovered by the Christian pilgrim in daily life with daily giving.
And while I can only make up answers about what Christ was thinking or intended, I do have the certainty of plentiful opportunities to give, I have an unnuanced command from Christ, and I look at giants everywhere who give as though it were simply the folding of a hand into another.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The Tailor
Time and again, I have found myself waiting. Sometimes I know what I’m waiting for—a bus, a signal to do something, an event to begin. Other times, the waiting, which begins as ho-hum, minute-ticking endurance, snaps into high drama, leaving me with a case of whiplash. This was the case when Happy, the bursar’s assistant, and I waited on the porch outside the tailor’s shop on a Tuesday morning at 9:00 a.m.
Happy had wanted me to have a kitenge, a traditional skirt and blouse that requires sophisticated tailoring. One woman cannot borrow another’s kitenge, no matter how similar they are in weight and shape. We’d gone to the tailor on a Saturday with fabric that Happy had bought for me. “Fundi” is a Swahili term for a skilled worker that includes not only tailors but also electricians, plumbers, landscapers, and so on. Despite knowing her tailor for a year, Happy doesn’t know his name. It’s a Muslim name, she said, Haji or something like that, but she only calls him “Fundi.”
On one wall of Fundi’s shop, two large posters featured photos of women in about sixty variations of kitenge, and I got a little dizzy after looking at forty. Along another wall, pinned to a string were dresses already sewn, and we looked at some of those, plus some that Fundi was pulling out from a mystery pile. Helda, the provost’s secretary, also happened to be in the shop, and suddenly the choosing turned into a group activity.
“What about this?”
“No, I don’t want to show that much bosom!”
“What about this?”
“Will I be able to walk in that?”
“Of course!”
After Fundi opened a large hardbound notebook, he took my measurements, recorded them and quickly drew the style of dress I’d chosen next to my measurements. Using scissors large enough to perform surgery on a cow, he cut off a tiny snip of fabric and taped it to the page. The dress would be ready in three weeks, which he also recorded along with Happy’s name and cell phone number.
Three weeks later, Fundi called Happy to tell her that the dress would be ready a day later, Tuesday morning. So we waited on the porch at 9:00 a.m. Across the street another dressmaker’s shop displayed a white confirmation dress hanging on the store front with shades of red dust creeping up the hem. Happy wanted to know if I’d worn one of those for my confirmation. I learned then that Lutherans in Tanzania wear white confirmation dresses, similar to the ones worn by Roman Catholic girls at their first communion. A few shops down was something called “Chinese Restaurant.” I asked if there were any Chinese in Moshi, and Happy said no, why did I ask? I pointed out the restaurant name and asked if they at least served Chinese food. “No,” she said, “it’s just a name.”
Soon someone not Fundi appeared and unlocked the shop. Happy exchanged Swahili words with him, and we moved from the porch step to the bench inside. There was more waiting, and Happy texted someone on her phone and then later called. At about 10:00, the tailor appeared, looking very tired. He shuffled over to a sewing machine next to Happy and murmured something. Without shifting or changing posture, Happy launched into a rapid-fire speech full of artillery. Fundi’s head drooped. Possibly he looked at the floor strewn with scraps of fabric or possibly his eyes looked at nothing. At one point, Happy fell silent, the air clearing of smoke. I thought the speech was over, but no, she was only re-loading. Occasionally she seemed to require an answer from Fundi who could only mumble until Happy forced him into answering his feeble excuse clearly and loudly.
When her fury had spent itself, I did not need Happy to tell me that the dress was not finished. But I wondered how far the fundi had gotten. Possibly we could stay in town for a while longer. When the fundi retrieved the fabric and unfolded the piece whole, I realized he hadn’t even started. So much for having the kitenge finished Tuesday morning.
I was puzzled by the fundi’s behavior. He had struck me as someone with integrity the time before. Clearly he loved his work, charged reasonable prices, and made sure he gave himself time to do good work. I thought it odd that he looked so tired at 9:00 in the morning. Then I remembered that the fundi was Muslim, and this was the month of Ramadan, a month of spiritual discipline much more intense than the Christian Lenten season. Muslims cannot eat or drink from sun-up to sundown during this month. Though they eat at night, some or many Muslims do not have much energy to function during the daylight hours.
Happy agreed that this was the case with the fundi, but she wasn’t going to forgive him for telling her that the kitenge was ready when it wasn’t. I had spent two hours either waiting or traveling on a bus to meet Happy in town, Happy had spent half an hour on a bus to meet me, plus we had waited another hour at the fundi’s shop staring at a non-Chinese restaurant.
We left the fundi, his head still hanging. In four more days we would return, the fundi would give a quiet speech of apology, and Happy would tell him that the dress looked bad. Because I can’t speak Kiswahili, I would be unable to assure the fundi that the kitenge was exquisitely made and fit like a glove. Instead I would only say that Happy was a liar, and the dress looked good.
Happy had wanted me to have a kitenge, a traditional skirt and blouse that requires sophisticated tailoring. One woman cannot borrow another’s kitenge, no matter how similar they are in weight and shape. We’d gone to the tailor on a Saturday with fabric that Happy had bought for me. “Fundi” is a Swahili term for a skilled worker that includes not only tailors but also electricians, plumbers, landscapers, and so on. Despite knowing her tailor for a year, Happy doesn’t know his name. It’s a Muslim name, she said, Haji or something like that, but she only calls him “Fundi.”
On one wall of Fundi’s shop, two large posters featured photos of women in about sixty variations of kitenge, and I got a little dizzy after looking at forty. Along another wall, pinned to a string were dresses already sewn, and we looked at some of those, plus some that Fundi was pulling out from a mystery pile. Helda, the provost’s secretary, also happened to be in the shop, and suddenly the choosing turned into a group activity.
“What about this?”
“No, I don’t want to show that much bosom!”
“What about this?”
“Will I be able to walk in that?”
“Of course!”
After Fundi opened a large hardbound notebook, he took my measurements, recorded them and quickly drew the style of dress I’d chosen next to my measurements. Using scissors large enough to perform surgery on a cow, he cut off a tiny snip of fabric and taped it to the page. The dress would be ready in three weeks, which he also recorded along with Happy’s name and cell phone number.
Three weeks later, Fundi called Happy to tell her that the dress would be ready a day later, Tuesday morning. So we waited on the porch at 9:00 a.m. Across the street another dressmaker’s shop displayed a white confirmation dress hanging on the store front with shades of red dust creeping up the hem. Happy wanted to know if I’d worn one of those for my confirmation. I learned then that Lutherans in Tanzania wear white confirmation dresses, similar to the ones worn by Roman Catholic girls at their first communion. A few shops down was something called “Chinese Restaurant.” I asked if there were any Chinese in Moshi, and Happy said no, why did I ask? I pointed out the restaurant name and asked if they at least served Chinese food. “No,” she said, “it’s just a name.”
Soon someone not Fundi appeared and unlocked the shop. Happy exchanged Swahili words with him, and we moved from the porch step to the bench inside. There was more waiting, and Happy texted someone on her phone and then later called. At about 10:00, the tailor appeared, looking very tired. He shuffled over to a sewing machine next to Happy and murmured something. Without shifting or changing posture, Happy launched into a rapid-fire speech full of artillery. Fundi’s head drooped. Possibly he looked at the floor strewn with scraps of fabric or possibly his eyes looked at nothing. At one point, Happy fell silent, the air clearing of smoke. I thought the speech was over, but no, she was only re-loading. Occasionally she seemed to require an answer from Fundi who could only mumble until Happy forced him into answering his feeble excuse clearly and loudly.
When her fury had spent itself, I did not need Happy to tell me that the dress was not finished. But I wondered how far the fundi had gotten. Possibly we could stay in town for a while longer. When the fundi retrieved the fabric and unfolded the piece whole, I realized he hadn’t even started. So much for having the kitenge finished Tuesday morning.
I was puzzled by the fundi’s behavior. He had struck me as someone with integrity the time before. Clearly he loved his work, charged reasonable prices, and made sure he gave himself time to do good work. I thought it odd that he looked so tired at 9:00 in the morning. Then I remembered that the fundi was Muslim, and this was the month of Ramadan, a month of spiritual discipline much more intense than the Christian Lenten season. Muslims cannot eat or drink from sun-up to sundown during this month. Though they eat at night, some or many Muslims do not have much energy to function during the daylight hours.
Happy agreed that this was the case with the fundi, but she wasn’t going to forgive him for telling her that the kitenge was ready when it wasn’t. I had spent two hours either waiting or traveling on a bus to meet Happy in town, Happy had spent half an hour on a bus to meet me, plus we had waited another hour at the fundi’s shop staring at a non-Chinese restaurant.
We left the fundi, his head still hanging. In four more days we would return, the fundi would give a quiet speech of apology, and Happy would tell him that the dress looked bad. Because I can’t speak Kiswahili, I would be unable to assure the fundi that the kitenge was exquisitely made and fit like a glove. Instead I would only say that Happy was a liar, and the dress looked good.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
A Simple Phone Call
The inner workings of the bursar’s daily toil at SMMUCo are not only visible, they are cumbersome and have monstrous proportions. One wooden table in a corner holds about fifteen ledger books. When the bursar, Tumaini, opens a ledger book, it spreads across the desk like a fold-out cot. Next to the table with the ledger books, a bookshelf looms large from floor to ceiling. It’s sole purpose is to support three-ring binders that have bank receipts and other necessary things snapped and bound into them.
The monstrous proportions mean monstrous tedium. For the last quarterly report, Tumaini and her assistant worked day and night in high gear for a full week, poring over books with tiny squares and tiny numbers. So when a computer software program arrived last week, Tumaini was overjoyed and immediately called the Information Technology man, Baraka, to the office to install it.
Then began a series of hurdles, small and large. First Baraka wasn’t answering his phone. This was small. When Tumaini wants something, Baraka drops whatever he’s doing because he and Tumaini belong to the Muhehe tribe in the Iringa Region, far away from the Chagga tribe here in Masoka. Soon Tumaini was leading Baraka away from his desk to her office.
As Baraka navigated through screen after screen to install the program, Tumaini was bubbling over with possibilities, some in English. A major report due in November that otherwise takes three months to prepare would now be a manageable task. Tumaini would no longer have to deal with accountants who complain her reports are so late. In the middle of Tumaini’s litany of possibilities, Baraka reached the step to register the program. It instructed the software owner to call a toll-free number in the U.S. For those of us outside the U.S., we could call a not-free number. Baraka, Tumaini, and I madly searched the screen for an email option but found none.
The problem with a not-free telephone number was not the financial part. Land lines in Tanzania have not been effectively established, and most of the country operates by cell phone. I explained to Tumaini and Baraka the problem with cell phones and international calls—you can lose the call at any instant with a rude beep, and often one or both voices break up. I also did not know how long this call would take, and once an international call has ended abruptly, one never knows if a second call is possible.
Tumaini’s euphoria wasn’t even slightly diluted. She was convinced that once she had the software, life would work out. Tumaini’s cell phone ring is a recorded voice of an inspirational singer calling out to the cheers of an audience, “God is good, all the time!” Jeanne, dreading hurdles all along, might as well have Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh as her cell phone ring.
We came up with the idea to email someone in the States to make this call. I volunteered my mother. But on campus that day, internet was not working. Still riding a wave of euphoria, Tumaini decided we would drive twenty minutes into town and use an internet café to email Mom. At the internet café, email was slower than usual. After fifteen minutes of not getting email, I asked Tumaini about using a phone with a landline in town. It would cost money but it would be simpler and hopefully faster. Tumaini was ready for the faster part.
Off we went to the post office where a man in a booth just outside the office operates the phone and sells stamps. An adjacent booth sat empty except for a telephone secured to a wooden box on a ledge. Tumaini paid for ten minutes and made sure we could add more when our time ran to seven minutes. Between the two booths, Tumaini stood ready to signal to pick up the phone. At this moment, she chose to teach me the Swahili words for “pick up” (“nyanyua”) and “put down” (“weka”). I dutifully repeated both, but I knew I’d never hang on to these words, mostly because I was thinking of all the things that could go wrong with this call: 1) I would spend the entire ten minutes on hold, 2) I wouldn’t be able to hear over the people passing by and greeting each other, 3) the line would be cut off in the middle of getting the secret authorization code and I’d never get the connection again.
At Tumaini’s signal of “nyanyua,” I picked up the phone and recognized an automated voice system. The first automated request was to press one for such-and-such, two for such-and-such, three to register your software. “Press three!” I yelled to Tumaini. “Tatu!” Tumaini yelled, and then a beep sounded in my ear. Next the automated system requested that I press my telephone number on the key pad now. Since my telephone had no keypad and I knew we didn’t have time to tell Phone Booth Man to press all of the numbers, I waited. Luckily the system gave us the option to speak to a customer service representative. “Press zero!” I yelled. “Sifuri!” yelled Tumaini.
Within a minute, a human began speaking, and just as I feared, I had trouble hearing. Both the customer service rep. and I repeated everything five times: What is your name? What is the business? Who is the contact person? How do you spell her name? (My mother would not have been able to answer any of these questions.) We’d managed to get through six questions five times each when the line was disconnected. I hollered to Tumaini who hollered to Phone Booth Man, and in half a minute, the connection returned and I was amazed to find the same customer service rep. still on the line. We got through two more questions when the line was disconnected again.
With the next call, I spoke to a different representative who saw on his computer screen that we’d gotten through the first six questions of the registration. About three more questions down the line, the service rep. asked where Tanzania was, followed by, what was Africa like? Was it all jungle? Did they have wild animals? In my mind, I was certain that the only thing connecting me and that service rep. were ten tiny threads of electric fibers, worn to shreds from millions of international calls. I was dangling by my little finger, desperate for the secret code that potentially could wipe away monstrous tedium for the bursar, and he wanted to know if Africa had only jungles. Not soon enough, the representative told me it would take two minutes to get the secret authorization code, please hold. The line was disconnected.
I wasn’t screaming, but I was pulling my hair out. With calm that passes all understanding, Tumaini said, “Jeanne, please come out here and sit on the bench for a while. Please.” Phone Booth Man needed to leave his station to get more change, and Tumaini clearly saw I needed to stop the anxiety attack that had rushed to a feverish pitch during the first and second calls. Now, sitting beside me, Tumaini read the newspaper, and I looked at words I didn’t know. Outside Western tourists looked at paintings that a walking vendor was rolling out on the sidewalk for them. Tumaini turned the page, and asked me if I liked football. I said I didn’t.
I wondered how it was possible for Tumaini, who two hours ago was so overjoyed she couldn’t think straight, could now read about a football match; how on the verge of a pivotal phone call, she could think to teach me two more Swahili words. It occurred to me that for Tumaini, a process like this happened all the time: a walk along a short path that only opened the way for another corner to turn, a downhill climb, an uphill climb, a tree to climb, and a boulder to roll up a hill.
In the booth again, I pleaded with the third customer service rep. to hurry, and she did. I read back the secret code, but I couldn’t hear the code numbers accurately. The rep. and I repeated the code several times until she believed I’d said the right code. As we rode home, Tumaini returned to the wave that carried her high above the clouds, stopping to buy chocolate for both of us.
A half hour later we were back at the office. Baraka had returned, typed in the code, and the code was not valid. Nor were the twenty other variations he tried. Now we waited for the weekend and Monday to arrive without knowing whether the road was up, down, or even existent.
In Kiswahili, “tumaini” means “hope.”
The monstrous proportions mean monstrous tedium. For the last quarterly report, Tumaini and her assistant worked day and night in high gear for a full week, poring over books with tiny squares and tiny numbers. So when a computer software program arrived last week, Tumaini was overjoyed and immediately called the Information Technology man, Baraka, to the office to install it.
Then began a series of hurdles, small and large. First Baraka wasn’t answering his phone. This was small. When Tumaini wants something, Baraka drops whatever he’s doing because he and Tumaini belong to the Muhehe tribe in the Iringa Region, far away from the Chagga tribe here in Masoka. Soon Tumaini was leading Baraka away from his desk to her office.
As Baraka navigated through screen after screen to install the program, Tumaini was bubbling over with possibilities, some in English. A major report due in November that otherwise takes three months to prepare would now be a manageable task. Tumaini would no longer have to deal with accountants who complain her reports are so late. In the middle of Tumaini’s litany of possibilities, Baraka reached the step to register the program. It instructed the software owner to call a toll-free number in the U.S. For those of us outside the U.S., we could call a not-free number. Baraka, Tumaini, and I madly searched the screen for an email option but found none.
The problem with a not-free telephone number was not the financial part. Land lines in Tanzania have not been effectively established, and most of the country operates by cell phone. I explained to Tumaini and Baraka the problem with cell phones and international calls—you can lose the call at any instant with a rude beep, and often one or both voices break up. I also did not know how long this call would take, and once an international call has ended abruptly, one never knows if a second call is possible.
Tumaini’s euphoria wasn’t even slightly diluted. She was convinced that once she had the software, life would work out. Tumaini’s cell phone ring is a recorded voice of an inspirational singer calling out to the cheers of an audience, “God is good, all the time!” Jeanne, dreading hurdles all along, might as well have Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh as her cell phone ring.
We came up with the idea to email someone in the States to make this call. I volunteered my mother. But on campus that day, internet was not working. Still riding a wave of euphoria, Tumaini decided we would drive twenty minutes into town and use an internet café to email Mom. At the internet café, email was slower than usual. After fifteen minutes of not getting email, I asked Tumaini about using a phone with a landline in town. It would cost money but it would be simpler and hopefully faster. Tumaini was ready for the faster part.
Off we went to the post office where a man in a booth just outside the office operates the phone and sells stamps. An adjacent booth sat empty except for a telephone secured to a wooden box on a ledge. Tumaini paid for ten minutes and made sure we could add more when our time ran to seven minutes. Between the two booths, Tumaini stood ready to signal to pick up the phone. At this moment, she chose to teach me the Swahili words for “pick up” (“nyanyua”) and “put down” (“weka”). I dutifully repeated both, but I knew I’d never hang on to these words, mostly because I was thinking of all the things that could go wrong with this call: 1) I would spend the entire ten minutes on hold, 2) I wouldn’t be able to hear over the people passing by and greeting each other, 3) the line would be cut off in the middle of getting the secret authorization code and I’d never get the connection again.
At Tumaini’s signal of “nyanyua,” I picked up the phone and recognized an automated voice system. The first automated request was to press one for such-and-such, two for such-and-such, three to register your software. “Press three!” I yelled to Tumaini. “Tatu!” Tumaini yelled, and then a beep sounded in my ear. Next the automated system requested that I press my telephone number on the key pad now. Since my telephone had no keypad and I knew we didn’t have time to tell Phone Booth Man to press all of the numbers, I waited. Luckily the system gave us the option to speak to a customer service representative. “Press zero!” I yelled. “Sifuri!” yelled Tumaini.
Within a minute, a human began speaking, and just as I feared, I had trouble hearing. Both the customer service rep. and I repeated everything five times: What is your name? What is the business? Who is the contact person? How do you spell her name? (My mother would not have been able to answer any of these questions.) We’d managed to get through six questions five times each when the line was disconnected. I hollered to Tumaini who hollered to Phone Booth Man, and in half a minute, the connection returned and I was amazed to find the same customer service rep. still on the line. We got through two more questions when the line was disconnected again.
With the next call, I spoke to a different representative who saw on his computer screen that we’d gotten through the first six questions of the registration. About three more questions down the line, the service rep. asked where Tanzania was, followed by, what was Africa like? Was it all jungle? Did they have wild animals? In my mind, I was certain that the only thing connecting me and that service rep. were ten tiny threads of electric fibers, worn to shreds from millions of international calls. I was dangling by my little finger, desperate for the secret code that potentially could wipe away monstrous tedium for the bursar, and he wanted to know if Africa had only jungles. Not soon enough, the representative told me it would take two minutes to get the secret authorization code, please hold. The line was disconnected.
I wasn’t screaming, but I was pulling my hair out. With calm that passes all understanding, Tumaini said, “Jeanne, please come out here and sit on the bench for a while. Please.” Phone Booth Man needed to leave his station to get more change, and Tumaini clearly saw I needed to stop the anxiety attack that had rushed to a feverish pitch during the first and second calls. Now, sitting beside me, Tumaini read the newspaper, and I looked at words I didn’t know. Outside Western tourists looked at paintings that a walking vendor was rolling out on the sidewalk for them. Tumaini turned the page, and asked me if I liked football. I said I didn’t.
I wondered how it was possible for Tumaini, who two hours ago was so overjoyed she couldn’t think straight, could now read about a football match; how on the verge of a pivotal phone call, she could think to teach me two more Swahili words. It occurred to me that for Tumaini, a process like this happened all the time: a walk along a short path that only opened the way for another corner to turn, a downhill climb, an uphill climb, a tree to climb, and a boulder to roll up a hill.
In the booth again, I pleaded with the third customer service rep. to hurry, and she did. I read back the secret code, but I couldn’t hear the code numbers accurately. The rep. and I repeated the code several times until she believed I’d said the right code. As we rode home, Tumaini returned to the wave that carried her high above the clouds, stopping to buy chocolate for both of us.
A half hour later we were back at the office. Baraka had returned, typed in the code, and the code was not valid. Nor were the twenty other variations he tried. Now we waited for the weekend and Monday to arrive without knowing whether the road was up, down, or even existent.
In Kiswahili, “tumaini” means “hope.”
Monday, September 28, 2009
The desk drawers of my brain
There are three language drawers in my brain. The first drawer has a bottom panel with many holes cut out of it. If I put a word in there, it quickly drops out. These are words I just heard and repeated ten times. A second drawer has words securely stashed away. In a third drawer, the bottom panel is warped, and though words drop out, I can retrieve them quickly. I cannot explain how words from these last two drawers are sorted and distributed, with one exception: words associated with a moment of extreme emotion.
After a month and a half in Tanzania, I went for yet another walk in the village and stopped at a fresh fruit and vegetable stand with a small crowd of about ten people. Both children and adults seemed to be passing the time visiting, and I interrupted by asking the woman behind the counter if she had any cookies, which was what I really wanted. I’m often surprised by what happens so I was willing to be surprised again. But no, they didn’t have any cookies. So I started asking the small crowd the names of the fruits and vegetables displayed.
Having people teach me Swahili words seems to be engaging – in two seconds I can have an entire room focused on teaching me every word they know. I cannot imagine Americans being this generous with a foreigner, but the Tanzanians have abundant generosity when it comes to teaching their language. I had actually been introduced to the names of the fruits and vegetables in front of me, but they’d all fallen out of the drawer with the holes in it. Having rejected the produce seller by asking for something she clearly didn’t have, I thought I’d at least make a gesture toward kindness or something like it. So I started reciting, once again, tomato (nyanya), carrot (caroti), cabbage (cabbagi), cucumbers (matango), and orange (chungwa).
Let me explain that I always get the word for “fruit” (matunda) and “orange” mixed up because at some critical point in my Swahili acquisition, whoever was teaching me at that moment used the word “fruit” for orange and I didn’t learn until later that “orange” was something else. From left to right on the shelf in front of me, I reviewed the carrot, cabbage, etc, and got to the orange. I fumbled around in my brain for an approximation of “matunda” which mysteriously shuffled with “matango” and came up with “matako.”
The group erupted in gales of laughter, and then I realized I’d given the word for “buttocks.” Faced with a group seizing with laughter, a group who knew I knew what I’d said because I can’t hide anything, I had no words in my head, all three drawers dumped out. So I shook my head and walked away, my face as red as the nyanya, and they were still laughing when I disappeared around the corner. And now I have a few more words added to the secure drawer.
After a month and a half in Tanzania, I went for yet another walk in the village and stopped at a fresh fruit and vegetable stand with a small crowd of about ten people. Both children and adults seemed to be passing the time visiting, and I interrupted by asking the woman behind the counter if she had any cookies, which was what I really wanted. I’m often surprised by what happens so I was willing to be surprised again. But no, they didn’t have any cookies. So I started asking the small crowd the names of the fruits and vegetables displayed.
Having people teach me Swahili words seems to be engaging – in two seconds I can have an entire room focused on teaching me every word they know. I cannot imagine Americans being this generous with a foreigner, but the Tanzanians have abundant generosity when it comes to teaching their language. I had actually been introduced to the names of the fruits and vegetables in front of me, but they’d all fallen out of the drawer with the holes in it. Having rejected the produce seller by asking for something she clearly didn’t have, I thought I’d at least make a gesture toward kindness or something like it. So I started reciting, once again, tomato (nyanya), carrot (caroti), cabbage (cabbagi), cucumbers (matango), and orange (chungwa).
Let me explain that I always get the word for “fruit” (matunda) and “orange” mixed up because at some critical point in my Swahili acquisition, whoever was teaching me at that moment used the word “fruit” for orange and I didn’t learn until later that “orange” was something else. From left to right on the shelf in front of me, I reviewed the carrot, cabbage, etc, and got to the orange. I fumbled around in my brain for an approximation of “matunda” which mysteriously shuffled with “matango” and came up with “matako.”
The group erupted in gales of laughter, and then I realized I’d given the word for “buttocks.” Faced with a group seizing with laughter, a group who knew I knew what I’d said because I can’t hide anything, I had no words in my head, all three drawers dumped out. So I shook my head and walked away, my face as red as the nyanya, and they were still laughing when I disappeared around the corner. And now I have a few more words added to the secure drawer.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
By the light of a full moon
I don’t think Tom Boyle, director of the library at Midland Lutheran College, had any idea that the two decks of playing cards he gave me as a parting gift would become a great gift to many others (or maybe he did). My first week here at SMMUCo (Stefano Moshi Memorial University College), I found those cards handy when the electricity went out almost every evening, the only thing I could see with candlelight and my cell phone flashlight strapped to the desk lamp.
When I played solitaire, I could look out my apartment window and see Johnny, the security guard, at his post by the entry gate. Besides visiting every villager and bus driver that passed by, Johnny had job duties to keep him occupied during the regular week – registering all campus visitors, watering flowers, putting up the flag of Tanzania, pushing the Land Cruiser out of the gate to start the engine, and so on.
However, Saturdays were slow. Both pedestrian and vehicular traffic almost vanished, especially from the campus side of the yellow gate, and Johnny patiently waited out the twelve-hour shift, sitting on a wooden desk, one leg swinging, one dreary endless stretch of nothing.
I thought of Johnny one night as I played solitaire by candlelight. If I didn’t have those cards at such times, I’d go nuts by myself with nothing to do. The next Saturday, I brought one shiny blue deck down to the entry gate with the idea that if I taught Johnny how to play solitaire, it would spell the long day. But the teaching was delayed. After I shuffled the cards, half the deck in each hand fanned through the thumb tips, Johnny spent some time laughing heartily. And then laughed again when I bent them back for the bridge, both making a shuffling, farting sound. For a while, I thought I’d never get around to teaching him anything because I had to shuffle ten more times. When his stomach hurt from laughing and he could no longer see through the tears in his eyes, I laid out the cards for solitaire, and by the second time round, someone else had come along who could translate much of what seemed a mystery for Johnny. However, translating was delayed—I was required to shuffle the deck for that person. After an hour, I left Johnny with the cards and wondered if he understood enough to play solitaire or whether he even wanted to. But it was a gift, no matter how Johnny would use Tom Boyle’s deck, and I only hoped it would ease the boredom of a Saturday.
While Johnny never did play solitaire, he played with everyone else that day. The cards magnetically brought people off the road, crowding around the wooden table on the platform. All day, players slapped cards on the table, winners shouted and leaped, losers pounded the table, accusing someone of cheating.
After several Saturdays, I remembered a game called Spoons. One sets spoons on the table, one less than the number of players, like musical chairs. The players pass cards to each other, one at a time, and the first player to get four of a kind, grabs a spoon. And like musical chairs, the others grab also. The person who doesn’t get the spoon is given an S. The next rounds occur the same way until one unfortunate player has lost enough rounds to spell out “Spoons.”
One evening after supper, the moon was full and the evening was slow. Johnny had finished his daily chores, and instead of using spoons, I brought out blue caps from water bottles to Johnny, his friend Innocent, and another guy who came from I-don’t-know-where. I had brought notes of Swahili words and within about five minutes, we were playing the first round of Spoons. Once again, a howling success. First, there’s the thrill of being the one with the four-of-a-kind, grabbing that cap before anyone else. Then there’s the thrill of seeing that one person with a stunned look when they realize they have failed to notice the caps are gone. When I showed the group how to remove the cap slyly enough so that people passed the cards a good two minutes before noticing, that was even better!
So there we were, lit by the full moon and the orange globes on the security posts. On one round, the cap flew off the table and two people leaped up to scramble for it on the ground. Soon we were joined by a teenaged boy. The next night it was the same group plus Haji the driver, plus a friend of the teenage boy who clearly did not have as much adrenalin as the rest of us—he lost the first ten rounds.
In the process of playing cards, interesting benefits came from it. The first teenage boy—fascinated either by my white skin, age spots, or gray hair—had many opportunities to stare at me. Secondly, I could listen for any Swahili words I might recognize and use. And everyone feels compelled to teach me, especially the teenaged boys. Third, both boys have started to use more English and ask for more English. They’ve picked up “next” as in who is the next loser, and we all point to the person across the table. They’ve picked up “winner” and “loser,” and I’ve picked up “mshindi” (winner) and “mshindwa” (loser).
By now, Tom Boyle’s cards are black with grime around the edges, and at night, they are damp from the dewy air. I can’t shuffle them as well, and dealing them out one by one takes a little longer. But in the light of the full moon, they haven’t lost the magic of creating marvelous communal fun.
When I played solitaire, I could look out my apartment window and see Johnny, the security guard, at his post by the entry gate. Besides visiting every villager and bus driver that passed by, Johnny had job duties to keep him occupied during the regular week – registering all campus visitors, watering flowers, putting up the flag of Tanzania, pushing the Land Cruiser out of the gate to start the engine, and so on.
However, Saturdays were slow. Both pedestrian and vehicular traffic almost vanished, especially from the campus side of the yellow gate, and Johnny patiently waited out the twelve-hour shift, sitting on a wooden desk, one leg swinging, one dreary endless stretch of nothing.
I thought of Johnny one night as I played solitaire by candlelight. If I didn’t have those cards at such times, I’d go nuts by myself with nothing to do. The next Saturday, I brought one shiny blue deck down to the entry gate with the idea that if I taught Johnny how to play solitaire, it would spell the long day. But the teaching was delayed. After I shuffled the cards, half the deck in each hand fanned through the thumb tips, Johnny spent some time laughing heartily. And then laughed again when I bent them back for the bridge, both making a shuffling, farting sound. For a while, I thought I’d never get around to teaching him anything because I had to shuffle ten more times. When his stomach hurt from laughing and he could no longer see through the tears in his eyes, I laid out the cards for solitaire, and by the second time round, someone else had come along who could translate much of what seemed a mystery for Johnny. However, translating was delayed—I was required to shuffle the deck for that person. After an hour, I left Johnny with the cards and wondered if he understood enough to play solitaire or whether he even wanted to. But it was a gift, no matter how Johnny would use Tom Boyle’s deck, and I only hoped it would ease the boredom of a Saturday.
While Johnny never did play solitaire, he played with everyone else that day. The cards magnetically brought people off the road, crowding around the wooden table on the platform. All day, players slapped cards on the table, winners shouted and leaped, losers pounded the table, accusing someone of cheating.
After several Saturdays, I remembered a game called Spoons. One sets spoons on the table, one less than the number of players, like musical chairs. The players pass cards to each other, one at a time, and the first player to get four of a kind, grabs a spoon. And like musical chairs, the others grab also. The person who doesn’t get the spoon is given an S. The next rounds occur the same way until one unfortunate player has lost enough rounds to spell out “Spoons.”
One evening after supper, the moon was full and the evening was slow. Johnny had finished his daily chores, and instead of using spoons, I brought out blue caps from water bottles to Johnny, his friend Innocent, and another guy who came from I-don’t-know-where. I had brought notes of Swahili words and within about five minutes, we were playing the first round of Spoons. Once again, a howling success. First, there’s the thrill of being the one with the four-of-a-kind, grabbing that cap before anyone else. Then there’s the thrill of seeing that one person with a stunned look when they realize they have failed to notice the caps are gone. When I showed the group how to remove the cap slyly enough so that people passed the cards a good two minutes before noticing, that was even better!
So there we were, lit by the full moon and the orange globes on the security posts. On one round, the cap flew off the table and two people leaped up to scramble for it on the ground. Soon we were joined by a teenaged boy. The next night it was the same group plus Haji the driver, plus a friend of the teenage boy who clearly did not have as much adrenalin as the rest of us—he lost the first ten rounds.
In the process of playing cards, interesting benefits came from it. The first teenage boy—fascinated either by my white skin, age spots, or gray hair—had many opportunities to stare at me. Secondly, I could listen for any Swahili words I might recognize and use. And everyone feels compelled to teach me, especially the teenaged boys. Third, both boys have started to use more English and ask for more English. They’ve picked up “next” as in who is the next loser, and we all point to the person across the table. They’ve picked up “winner” and “loser,” and I’ve picked up “mshindi” (winner) and “mshindwa” (loser).
By now, Tom Boyle’s cards are black with grime around the edges, and at night, they are damp from the dewy air. I can’t shuffle them as well, and dealing them out one by one takes a little longer. But in the light of the full moon, they haven’t lost the magic of creating marvelous communal fun.
By the light of a full moon
I don’t think Tom Boyle, director of the library at Midland Lutheran College, had any idea that the two decks of playing cards he gave me as a parting gift would become a great gift to many others (or maybe he did). My first week here at SMMUCo (Stefano Moshi Memorial University College), I found those cards handy when the electricity went out almost every evening, the only thing I could see with candlelight and my cell phone flashlight strapped to the desk lamp.
When I played solitaire, I could look out my apartment window and see Johnny, the security guard, at his post by the entry gate. Besides visiting every villager and bus driver that passed by, Johnny had job duties to keep him occupied during the regular week – registering all campus visitors, watering flowers, putting up the flag of Tanzania, pushing the Land Cruiser out of the gate to start the engine, and so on.
However, Saturdays were slow. Both pedestrian and vehicular traffic almost vanished, especially from the campus side of the yellow gate, and Johnny patiently waited out the twelve-hour shift, sitting on a wooden desk, one leg swinging, one dreary endless stretch of nothing.
I thought of Johnny one night as I played solitaire by candlelight. If I didn’t have those cards at such times, I’d go nuts by myself with nothing to do. The next Saturday, I brought one shiny blue deck down to the entry gate with the idea that if I taught Johnny how to play solitaire, it would spell the long day. But the teaching was delayed. After I shuffled the cards, half the deck in each hand fanned through the thumb tips, Johnny spent some time laughing heartily. And then laughed again when I bent them back for the bridge, both making a shuffling, farting sound. For a while, I thought I’d never get around to teaching him anything because I had to shuffle ten more times. When his stomach hurt from laughing and he could no longer see through the tears in his eyes, I laid out the cards for solitaire, and by the second time round, someone else had come along who could translate much of what seemed a mystery for Johnny. However, translating was delayed—I was required to shuffle the deck for that person. After an hour, I left Johnny with the cards and wondered if he understood enough to play solitaire or whether he even wanted to. But it was a gift, no matter how Johnny would use Tom Boyle’s deck, and I only hoped it would ease the boredom of a Saturday.
While Johnny never did play solitaire, he played with everyone else that day. The cards magnetically brought people off the road, crowding around the wooden table on the platform. All day, players slapped cards on the table, winners shouted and leaped, losers pounded the table, accusing someone of cheating.
After several Saturdays, I remembered a game called Spoons. One sets spoons on the table, one less than the number of players, like musical chairs. The players pass cards to each other, one at a time, and the first player to get four of a kind, grabs a spoon. And like musical chairs, the others grab also. The person who doesn’t get the spoon is given an S. The next rounds occur the same way until one unfortunate player has lost enough rounds to spell out “Spoons.”
One evening after supper, the moon was full and the evening was slow. Johnny had finished his daily chores, and instead of using spoons, I brought out blue caps from water bottles to Johnny, his friend Innocent, and another guy who came from I-don’t-know-where. I had brought notes of Swahili words and within about five minutes, we were playing the first round of Spoons. Once again, a howling success. First, there’s the thrill of being the one with the four-of-a-kind, grabbing that cap before anyone else. Then there’s the thrill of seeing that one person with a stunned look when they realize they have failed to notice the caps are gone. When I showed the group how to remove the cap slyly enough so that people passed the cards a good two minutes before noticing, that was even better!
So there we were, lit by the full moon and the orange globes on the security posts. On one round, the cap flew off the table and two people leaped up to scramble for it on the ground. Soon we were joined by a teenaged boy. The next night it was the same group plus Haji the driver, plus a friend of the teenage boy who clearly did not have as much adrenalin as the rest of us—he lost the first ten rounds.
In the process of playing cards, interesting benefits came from it. The first teenage boy—fascinated either by my white skin, age spots, or gray hair—had many opportunities to stare at me. Secondly, I could listen for any Swahili words I might recognize and use. And everyone feels compelled to teach me, especially the teenaged boys. Third, both boys have started to use more English and ask for more English. They’ve picked up “next” as in who is the next loser, and we all point to the person across the table. They’ve picked up “winner” and “loser,” and I’ve picked up “mshindi” (winner) and “mshindwa” (loser).
By now, Tom Boyle’s cards are black with grime around the edges, and at night, they are damp from the dewy air. I can’t shuffle them as well, and dealing them out one by one takes a little longer. But in the light of the full moon, they haven’t lost the magic of creating marvelous communal fun.
When I played solitaire, I could look out my apartment window and see Johnny, the security guard, at his post by the entry gate. Besides visiting every villager and bus driver that passed by, Johnny had job duties to keep him occupied during the regular week – registering all campus visitors, watering flowers, putting up the flag of Tanzania, pushing the Land Cruiser out of the gate to start the engine, and so on.
However, Saturdays were slow. Both pedestrian and vehicular traffic almost vanished, especially from the campus side of the yellow gate, and Johnny patiently waited out the twelve-hour shift, sitting on a wooden desk, one leg swinging, one dreary endless stretch of nothing.
I thought of Johnny one night as I played solitaire by candlelight. If I didn’t have those cards at such times, I’d go nuts by myself with nothing to do. The next Saturday, I brought one shiny blue deck down to the entry gate with the idea that if I taught Johnny how to play solitaire, it would spell the long day. But the teaching was delayed. After I shuffled the cards, half the deck in each hand fanned through the thumb tips, Johnny spent some time laughing heartily. And then laughed again when I bent them back for the bridge, both making a shuffling, farting sound. For a while, I thought I’d never get around to teaching him anything because I had to shuffle ten more times. When his stomach hurt from laughing and he could no longer see through the tears in his eyes, I laid out the cards for solitaire, and by the second time round, someone else had come along who could translate much of what seemed a mystery for Johnny. However, translating was delayed—I was required to shuffle the deck for that person. After an hour, I left Johnny with the cards and wondered if he understood enough to play solitaire or whether he even wanted to. But it was a gift, no matter how Johnny would use Tom Boyle’s deck, and I only hoped it would ease the boredom of a Saturday.
While Johnny never did play solitaire, he played with everyone else that day. The cards magnetically brought people off the road, crowding around the wooden table on the platform. All day, players slapped cards on the table, winners shouted and leaped, losers pounded the table, accusing someone of cheating.
After several Saturdays, I remembered a game called Spoons. One sets spoons on the table, one less than the number of players, like musical chairs. The players pass cards to each other, one at a time, and the first player to get four of a kind, grabs a spoon. And like musical chairs, the others grab also. The person who doesn’t get the spoon is given an S. The next rounds occur the same way until one unfortunate player has lost enough rounds to spell out “Spoons.”
One evening after supper, the moon was full and the evening was slow. Johnny had finished his daily chores, and instead of using spoons, I brought out blue caps from water bottles to Johnny, his friend Innocent, and another guy who came from I-don’t-know-where. I had brought notes of Swahili words and within about five minutes, we were playing the first round of Spoons. Once again, a howling success. First, there’s the thrill of being the one with the four-of-a-kind, grabbing that cap before anyone else. Then there’s the thrill of seeing that one person with a stunned look when they realize they have failed to notice the caps are gone. When I showed the group how to remove the cap slyly enough so that people passed the cards a good two minutes before noticing, that was even better!
So there we were, lit by the full moon and the orange globes on the security posts. On one round, the cap flew off the table and two people leaped up to scramble for it on the ground. Soon we were joined by a teenaged boy. The next night it was the same group plus Haji the driver, plus a friend of the teenage boy who clearly did not have as much adrenalin as the rest of us—he lost the first ten rounds.
In the process of playing cards, interesting benefits came from it. The first teenage boy—fascinated either by my white skin, age spots, or gray hair—had many opportunities to stare at me. Secondly, I could listen for any Swahili words I might recognize and use. And everyone feels compelled to teach me, especially the teenaged boys. Third, both boys have started to use more English and ask for more English. They’ve picked up “next” as in who is the next loser, and we all point to the person across the table. They’ve picked up “winner” and “loser,” and I’ve picked up “mshindi” (winner) and “mshindwa” (loser).
By now, Tom Boyle’s cards are black with grime around the edges, and at night, they are damp from the dewy air. I can’t shuffle them as well, and dealing them out one by one takes a little longer. But in the light of the full moon, they haven’t lost the magic of creating marvelous communal fun.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Bus Ride: A Royal Banquet
Varying levels of buses carry thousands and probably millions of Tanzanians every day. There isn’t a bus that doesn’t have pressed against its windows ten elbows, five hands, and heads. Here at Stefano Moshi Memorial University College (SMMUCo), there’s a bus stop just outside the gate. But you would never know it. A little wooden structure nearby, with banana leaf thatched on the roof, looks like a bus stop, but I discovered that if I sit in that little hut, the bus will roar on by. I have to stand on the road at the right unmarked spot and only that spot.
For me, taking the bus meant a little freedom, but it also required an attitude adjustment. As a Nebraskan, the sight of packed buses made me gulp. In a church pew, I scoot over for the next two or three persons, allowing them enough room for ten. I noticed I had this need for personal space on a trip to India. I was the first one to arrive at the baggage claim area in the Dehli airport. Soon crowds of Indians planted themselves next to me, and I gave way, allowing them the personal space I thought we all required. In a few minutes, I found myself thinking, how can it be that I was the first one here and the farthest from the baggage claim?
There’s a parable in the book of Matthew that portrays the shift that I needed in order to appreciate a bus ride. In it, the kingdom of heaven is likened to a wedding banquet. A king invites people, I suppose his aristocratic friends and relatives, and they all disregard the invitation as nothing worth going to. Or worse, they abuse and kill the wretched servant who delivered the wedding invitation. They are later murdered by the king’s troops. Having eliminated his guest pool, the king sends out another series of invitations to the regular folk, who appreciate the fine opportunity and appear. However, of those regular folk, one makes the mistake of wearing non-wedding clothes, and that fool is cast into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Since I’m unequipped to comprehend the kingdom of heaven, I think of education as a wedding banquet. Education raises humans to greater levels of confidence, dignity, and freedom. It allows them to become more human. An inspiring example comes from the Washington-Midland Connection, a program where Midland and Fremont community members tutor parents of students of Washington Elementary School. These parents come after long hard days at work and put their hearts and souls into learning. They come in their finest sequins and silk bow ties.
But too often students do not understand education as a wedding banquet. This is not true of all students, but in my experience, it’s true of too many of them. They come to class not having purchased a textbook, or they haven’t done the assignment, or they text-message someone else instead of paying attention to the class session. They come to my wedding banquet in acid-washed jeans! When it came to riding buses in Moshi, Tanzania, I was guilty of wearing my own threadbare jeans.
Mysteriously, my attitude shifted, and I’m not sure whether it happened before or during the trip to town and back, but I finally understood that a bus ride was one of the greatest adventures ever. First, when you’re standing at the bus stop, you never know what will stop and invite you in. This sounds dangerous. Don’t get in the little car with four energetic men yelling, “Mzungu, come join us!”
Today, when the pickup with ten people in the back honked and beckoned me to join them, I climbed on board. Bolted onto the pickup bed was a frame of metal bars that we all clung to, except the young mother who sat on the wheel well holding her baby. I planted my feet on either side of two large buckets and wrapped my upper arms and hands on the metal frame to keep my teeth from being knocked out. With occasional lurches, I was shoved into the guy in front of me who had offered to marry me moments ago. When we stopped to pick up others, we all shifted even closer and at one point, I was able to look around and see that a mountain of people had grown up behind me.
On the way back to the college, I climbed into a van that had the official markings and right destination painted on its front. (Also, the passenger in the front seat grabbed my wrist and said, “Where?”) Inside, I stood against a wall, hovering over the heads of seated passengers. The only thing I could grip was a ledge inside the van from a defunct ventilation system—the grip bar was already covered in hands. The man in the seat below me had his ear in my stomach. When we added more to the van, all of us against the wall shifted even more and now I had a nun’s shoulder. Her head bowed over the seat in front of her, either to pray or make room or both.
I’m not sure what maximum capacity is in these vans. I thought we’d reached maximum capacity until we stopped four more times. After counting 30, I stopped because I couldn’t see. And then the pressure inside was eased when two and then three people squeezed out. They were greatly helped by me, the only one along the wall willing to move out of the van to make way. That’s another part of the adventure – stepping off and getting back in before the van takes off without you. And I did it! Even better, the nun now patted the seat beside her, inviting me to join her. So one-fourth of my rump carried the load for the rest of the way, relieving what had carried the load earlier: my neck, knuckles and elbow.
In the parable of the wedding banquet, the banquet is an invitation. It is clearly up to those invited to choose how they will respond. For me on this day, perceiving this trip as a miserable crowding of people, of bad smells (someone had stepped in dog doo), of total discomfort and undignified positions, was to arrive at the wedding banquet in ordinary clothing. The outer darkness would be the misery that I could easily suffer and appreciate.
In Tanzania, many, most, or all who ride those buses have no choice. For those who are weary or sick, can a bus ride be an invitation? And for those who need to get somewhere urgently, is a sense of adventure possible? I have to accept the fact that I had an invitation for adventure while many others did and do not. Also, I do not know if I’ll have a right spirit about the bus ride after the tenth or fiftieth trip to town.
It appears, then, that the kingdom of heaven, as far as I can tell with mortal dim eyes, comes as a momentary glimpse, one light beam cast through a window into a dark house. And of the glimpse that I got, here is what I saw: riding public transportation in Moshi, Tanzania, is to discover who will stop for you. It’s to discover how many of you will fit together. It’s to discover how you can hang on. It’s to discover who will help whom. It’s to discover how humanity folds together and to join in the communal act of folding.
For me, taking the bus meant a little freedom, but it also required an attitude adjustment. As a Nebraskan, the sight of packed buses made me gulp. In a church pew, I scoot over for the next two or three persons, allowing them enough room for ten. I noticed I had this need for personal space on a trip to India. I was the first one to arrive at the baggage claim area in the Dehli airport. Soon crowds of Indians planted themselves next to me, and I gave way, allowing them the personal space I thought we all required. In a few minutes, I found myself thinking, how can it be that I was the first one here and the farthest from the baggage claim?
There’s a parable in the book of Matthew that portrays the shift that I needed in order to appreciate a bus ride. In it, the kingdom of heaven is likened to a wedding banquet. A king invites people, I suppose his aristocratic friends and relatives, and they all disregard the invitation as nothing worth going to. Or worse, they abuse and kill the wretched servant who delivered the wedding invitation. They are later murdered by the king’s troops. Having eliminated his guest pool, the king sends out another series of invitations to the regular folk, who appreciate the fine opportunity and appear. However, of those regular folk, one makes the mistake of wearing non-wedding clothes, and that fool is cast into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Since I’m unequipped to comprehend the kingdom of heaven, I think of education as a wedding banquet. Education raises humans to greater levels of confidence, dignity, and freedom. It allows them to become more human. An inspiring example comes from the Washington-Midland Connection, a program where Midland and Fremont community members tutor parents of students of Washington Elementary School. These parents come after long hard days at work and put their hearts and souls into learning. They come in their finest sequins and silk bow ties.
But too often students do not understand education as a wedding banquet. This is not true of all students, but in my experience, it’s true of too many of them. They come to class not having purchased a textbook, or they haven’t done the assignment, or they text-message someone else instead of paying attention to the class session. They come to my wedding banquet in acid-washed jeans! When it came to riding buses in Moshi, Tanzania, I was guilty of wearing my own threadbare jeans.
Mysteriously, my attitude shifted, and I’m not sure whether it happened before or during the trip to town and back, but I finally understood that a bus ride was one of the greatest adventures ever. First, when you’re standing at the bus stop, you never know what will stop and invite you in. This sounds dangerous. Don’t get in the little car with four energetic men yelling, “Mzungu, come join us!”
Today, when the pickup with ten people in the back honked and beckoned me to join them, I climbed on board. Bolted onto the pickup bed was a frame of metal bars that we all clung to, except the young mother who sat on the wheel well holding her baby. I planted my feet on either side of two large buckets and wrapped my upper arms and hands on the metal frame to keep my teeth from being knocked out. With occasional lurches, I was shoved into the guy in front of me who had offered to marry me moments ago. When we stopped to pick up others, we all shifted even closer and at one point, I was able to look around and see that a mountain of people had grown up behind me.
On the way back to the college, I climbed into a van that had the official markings and right destination painted on its front. (Also, the passenger in the front seat grabbed my wrist and said, “Where?”) Inside, I stood against a wall, hovering over the heads of seated passengers. The only thing I could grip was a ledge inside the van from a defunct ventilation system—the grip bar was already covered in hands. The man in the seat below me had his ear in my stomach. When we added more to the van, all of us against the wall shifted even more and now I had a nun’s shoulder. Her head bowed over the seat in front of her, either to pray or make room or both.
I’m not sure what maximum capacity is in these vans. I thought we’d reached maximum capacity until we stopped four more times. After counting 30, I stopped because I couldn’t see. And then the pressure inside was eased when two and then three people squeezed out. They were greatly helped by me, the only one along the wall willing to move out of the van to make way. That’s another part of the adventure – stepping off and getting back in before the van takes off without you. And I did it! Even better, the nun now patted the seat beside her, inviting me to join her. So one-fourth of my rump carried the load for the rest of the way, relieving what had carried the load earlier: my neck, knuckles and elbow.
In the parable of the wedding banquet, the banquet is an invitation. It is clearly up to those invited to choose how they will respond. For me on this day, perceiving this trip as a miserable crowding of people, of bad smells (someone had stepped in dog doo), of total discomfort and undignified positions, was to arrive at the wedding banquet in ordinary clothing. The outer darkness would be the misery that I could easily suffer and appreciate.
In Tanzania, many, most, or all who ride those buses have no choice. For those who are weary or sick, can a bus ride be an invitation? And for those who need to get somewhere urgently, is a sense of adventure possible? I have to accept the fact that I had an invitation for adventure while many others did and do not. Also, I do not know if I’ll have a right spirit about the bus ride after the tenth or fiftieth trip to town.
It appears, then, that the kingdom of heaven, as far as I can tell with mortal dim eyes, comes as a momentary glimpse, one light beam cast through a window into a dark house. And of the glimpse that I got, here is what I saw: riding public transportation in Moshi, Tanzania, is to discover who will stop for you. It’s to discover how many of you will fit together. It’s to discover how you can hang on. It’s to discover who will help whom. It’s to discover how humanity folds together and to join in the communal act of folding.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Hanging on to the rope
In the midst of learning greetings, I’ve watched how Tanzanians communicate physically. Whenever I make a joke, someone not only throws back their head with laughter, but they also raise their hand to slap mine. The raised hand seems to mean that the person laughing acknowledges that the joke was a good one, and the joker receives the appreciation by putting out the palm, and the whole thing becomes a physical exchange. It looks like a horizontal high-five, so I figured out the response quickly. It was either that or have some other part of me slapped.
This week I happened upon a colleague named Ebenezer who was standing in front of the administration building waiting for the electricity to return. We exchanged pleasantries, and I don’t remember Ebenezer’s joke, but I laughed heartily and suddenly my hand was slapping Ebenezer’s. It startled me, finding Ebenezer’s hand under mine and then realizing that I must’ve done that raise-the-hand thing without thinking.
Unlike the hand thing, the verbal part of learning to communicate has been tedious. First, let me say I only know one language fluently (English). I took a year of German in high school, a year of Spanish in college, and promptly forgot 99% of what I had learned through no fault of my teachers. Once again, I’m starting from scratch with Kiswahili, acquiring basic greetings and responses, and as many nouns and a few adjectives that my brain will take. But the basic greetings still feel like a stylized dance. If someone offers “How are you?” I can respond with “I’m fine.” On my walks down the road, I mentally rehearse “How are you this morning?” or “How are you today?” or “How are you za guaco?” I still don’t know what “za guaco” means, but when I tack it onto a sentence, people say they’re fine.
I remember certain words out of necessity. The word “wait” came in handy this past week as I’ve been proctoring semester exams. I needed the word “wait” when a student tried to exit to the bathroom without signing out. Students had to wait before they could begin taking the exam. I also witnessed a young boy yell to a driver to wait—Subiri! Subiri!—so that a car passenger who had just disembarked could retrieve something from the car.
This initial stage of language acquisition reminds me of learning to water ski, way back in time when my body was elastic. In the cold Minnesota lake water, I strained to control two long skis bobbing on the ends of my legs and at the same time untangle my head or arm out of the rope. Meanwhile, some grown-up was holding me up by my life jacket far enough out of the water so that I didn’t have to think about how I would breathe underwater as well. Usually the grownup gave advice—“Relax your knees! Keep your head up! Bend your legs! Lean back! Not too far! Don’t pull too hard on the rope!”
There was no way I was going to hang on to that advice. After I yelled “hit it!” through chattering teeth to the boat driver, I hung on to the rope. If I was lucky, I could manage an excruciating 35 degree angle for a while and then crash. One time I forgot to let go of the rope and found my nostrils thoroughly irrigated. Eventually I actually emerged from the water to a vertical position, defying all likelihood that it would ever happen.
For 3 ½ weeks, I’ve been dreading the likelihood that I’ll never get beyond, “How are you za guaco?” But at the last part of this week, something happened that seemed to shift me a little more out of the water and closer to a 45 degree angle. I, along with about nine other college personnel, took a trip to town in the College’s Land Cruiser, driven by Haji. Haji had made the first stop, two people leapt off, and the vehicle began to roll away with the back door swinging wide open. Mr. Priva, who is no spring chicken, sat on the end, and I dreaded watching him try to retrieve the door in a vehicle bouncing down a road paved with boulders. Without thinking, I yelled, “Wait! Wait! Subiri!” There it was, that moment I emerged a little from the water, defying all odds. Even better, the group recognized the miracle and applauded—they too are tired of “How are you za guaco?”
Linguistic note ONLY to English teachers and grammar tsars: I realize the second sentence in this post violates the pronoun-antecedent agreement rule. One of the most valuable things I learned from a graduate course in linguistics is that the prescriptive rules of language are arbitrary. Second, the rules of language constantly change. Back in the day, we would’ve said, “…someone not only throws back his head with laughter, but he also raises…” Gradually custom has changed so that girls and women are no longer excluded in sentences with singular pronouns. I heartily support that. However, sentences with clunky she/he constructions drive me nuts. I could’ve avoided the clunky she/he by using the plural, as in “people not only throw their head back with laughter…” but I wanted to emphasize the one-to-one exchange in the hand slap. Therefore, I have purposefully used the singular “someone” with the plural “their,” hoping that the rules will change. They will change, not by any announcement (at least, not that I know of), but by frequent use. Perhaps I can convince you to keep it up.
This week I happened upon a colleague named Ebenezer who was standing in front of the administration building waiting for the electricity to return. We exchanged pleasantries, and I don’t remember Ebenezer’s joke, but I laughed heartily and suddenly my hand was slapping Ebenezer’s. It startled me, finding Ebenezer’s hand under mine and then realizing that I must’ve done that raise-the-hand thing without thinking.
Unlike the hand thing, the verbal part of learning to communicate has been tedious. First, let me say I only know one language fluently (English). I took a year of German in high school, a year of Spanish in college, and promptly forgot 99% of what I had learned through no fault of my teachers. Once again, I’m starting from scratch with Kiswahili, acquiring basic greetings and responses, and as many nouns and a few adjectives that my brain will take. But the basic greetings still feel like a stylized dance. If someone offers “How are you?” I can respond with “I’m fine.” On my walks down the road, I mentally rehearse “How are you this morning?” or “How are you today?” or “How are you za guaco?” I still don’t know what “za guaco” means, but when I tack it onto a sentence, people say they’re fine.
I remember certain words out of necessity. The word “wait” came in handy this past week as I’ve been proctoring semester exams. I needed the word “wait” when a student tried to exit to the bathroom without signing out. Students had to wait before they could begin taking the exam. I also witnessed a young boy yell to a driver to wait—Subiri! Subiri!—so that a car passenger who had just disembarked could retrieve something from the car.
This initial stage of language acquisition reminds me of learning to water ski, way back in time when my body was elastic. In the cold Minnesota lake water, I strained to control two long skis bobbing on the ends of my legs and at the same time untangle my head or arm out of the rope. Meanwhile, some grown-up was holding me up by my life jacket far enough out of the water so that I didn’t have to think about how I would breathe underwater as well. Usually the grownup gave advice—“Relax your knees! Keep your head up! Bend your legs! Lean back! Not too far! Don’t pull too hard on the rope!”
There was no way I was going to hang on to that advice. After I yelled “hit it!” through chattering teeth to the boat driver, I hung on to the rope. If I was lucky, I could manage an excruciating 35 degree angle for a while and then crash. One time I forgot to let go of the rope and found my nostrils thoroughly irrigated. Eventually I actually emerged from the water to a vertical position, defying all likelihood that it would ever happen.
For 3 ½ weeks, I’ve been dreading the likelihood that I’ll never get beyond, “How are you za guaco?” But at the last part of this week, something happened that seemed to shift me a little more out of the water and closer to a 45 degree angle. I, along with about nine other college personnel, took a trip to town in the College’s Land Cruiser, driven by Haji. Haji had made the first stop, two people leapt off, and the vehicle began to roll away with the back door swinging wide open. Mr. Priva, who is no spring chicken, sat on the end, and I dreaded watching him try to retrieve the door in a vehicle bouncing down a road paved with boulders. Without thinking, I yelled, “Wait! Wait! Subiri!” There it was, that moment I emerged a little from the water, defying all odds. Even better, the group recognized the miracle and applauded—they too are tired of “How are you za guaco?”
Linguistic note ONLY to English teachers and grammar tsars: I realize the second sentence in this post violates the pronoun-antecedent agreement rule. One of the most valuable things I learned from a graduate course in linguistics is that the prescriptive rules of language are arbitrary. Second, the rules of language constantly change. Back in the day, we would’ve said, “…someone not only throws back his head with laughter, but he also raises…” Gradually custom has changed so that girls and women are no longer excluded in sentences with singular pronouns. I heartily support that. However, sentences with clunky she/he constructions drive me nuts. I could’ve avoided the clunky she/he by using the plural, as in “people not only throw their head back with laughter…” but I wanted to emphasize the one-to-one exchange in the hand slap. Therefore, I have purposefully used the singular “someone” with the plural “their,” hoping that the rules will change. They will change, not by any announcement (at least, not that I know of), but by frequent use. Perhaps I can convince you to keep it up.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Finding a seamstress
Before I left the States, I had bought about five skirts from Goodwill that all needed pockets. In lieu of pockets, I’ve been using a zippered pouch that my good friend and Midland colleague, Alcyone Scott, had loaned me. She had gotten it from a Sigma Tau Delta convention, and I initially used it to carry a passport since it has a handy cord to hang around my neck.
Essentially I’ve become a kangaroo. I carry my keys in that pouch – huge skeleton keys for both interior and exterior doors to my apartment. I carry my cell phone. I carry scraps of paper with vocabulary words, someone’s cell phone number, or a note I wrote in Swahili for Kimaro, the cook. I also carry a priority list of who I need to email first, second, third, etc. in the off chance that I can get internet.
I’ve been eternally grateful to and for this pouch and Alcyone. However, it lacks aesthetic appeal. Its bright red color and Steven Barclay Agency advertisement does not in any way work in design or color with my pale green, blue, green blue, and burnt orange skirts. I’ve tried to hide it under a light weight jacket, but the fact of the matter is, pockets would be better. For one thing, I wouldn’t have to remember where I left my pockets each morning before I left my apartment.
Before I left the States, I told my mother about the pocket problem. She assured me Tanzania would have many seamstresses who would be able to sew pockets. She was right! (I cannot tell you how many times my mother has been right!) When I take my daily walks down the red dusty road, within a half hour of walking, I’ll have found ten seamstresses. They each sit at a treadle sewing machine under the porch of a stucco building. Sheets of bright fabric hang from a string along the porch in front of them, and if a bus isn’t roaring down the road, you can hear their machines whirring away.
I chose my seamstress by her smile, which brightened even more when I ventured off the road one day, into her yard and onto the porch. At that point my Swahili was still at the how-are-you stage, and she helped me with “I am fine.” We both tried for more communication, and the best we could do was smile and shrug.
Then I discovered Happy, the bursar’s assistant, was an excellent resource for writing notes whenever I needed help in communicating. I had initially used Tumaini, the head bursar, as a translator. Her method was to call up the other party on her cell phone and deliver my message in rapid-fire sentences at full volume. Not only did the poor ear on the other end get the message, so did everyone in the building. But Tumaini left for a week-long business meeting, and so I turned to Happy. Happy composed pithy messages in her head, I wrote them down, she explained each word, and then I put each note in my bright red pouch.
For the trip to the seamstress, Happy had thought of two sentences I would need. Also, she knew I would need to clarify that I wanted two pockets, and that the pockets should go inside (ndani) the seam. Finally we worked on how I would ask the seamstress when she’d be able to have the pockets done, which turned into a lesson on the seven days of the week.
So it was, I appeared at the whirring machine of the seamstress, bright fabric hanging above and a bright smile radiating from within her. I pulled out my scrap of paper from the red pouch, and in my best Swahili accent, I asked the first question dictated by Happy. And then I wondered why the bright smile vanished into thin air. And why didn’t she take the skirt from my hands and look at pocket possibilities? I looked down at the words thinking I’d mispronounced them, and then at the translation below: “When can you have it finished?” I slapped my paper over and read, “Please put pockets in my skirt,” the bright smile re-appearing. The rest of the transaction happened according to plan. Happy had given me all the right words.
Not only had Happy given me all the right words, my mother had given me the right advice, Alcyone had given me the pouch, the Nebraska Synod of the ELCA and SMMUCo had given me the job here in Tanzania, Midland Lutheran College had given me the year off to do it, and the Lord had given me the wisdom to recognize the radiance of a seamstress, dimmed only momentarily by linguistic confusion.
Essentially I’ve become a kangaroo. I carry my keys in that pouch – huge skeleton keys for both interior and exterior doors to my apartment. I carry my cell phone. I carry scraps of paper with vocabulary words, someone’s cell phone number, or a note I wrote in Swahili for Kimaro, the cook. I also carry a priority list of who I need to email first, second, third, etc. in the off chance that I can get internet.
I’ve been eternally grateful to and for this pouch and Alcyone. However, it lacks aesthetic appeal. Its bright red color and Steven Barclay Agency advertisement does not in any way work in design or color with my pale green, blue, green blue, and burnt orange skirts. I’ve tried to hide it under a light weight jacket, but the fact of the matter is, pockets would be better. For one thing, I wouldn’t have to remember where I left my pockets each morning before I left my apartment.
Before I left the States, I told my mother about the pocket problem. She assured me Tanzania would have many seamstresses who would be able to sew pockets. She was right! (I cannot tell you how many times my mother has been right!) When I take my daily walks down the red dusty road, within a half hour of walking, I’ll have found ten seamstresses. They each sit at a treadle sewing machine under the porch of a stucco building. Sheets of bright fabric hang from a string along the porch in front of them, and if a bus isn’t roaring down the road, you can hear their machines whirring away.
I chose my seamstress by her smile, which brightened even more when I ventured off the road one day, into her yard and onto the porch. At that point my Swahili was still at the how-are-you stage, and she helped me with “I am fine.” We both tried for more communication, and the best we could do was smile and shrug.
Then I discovered Happy, the bursar’s assistant, was an excellent resource for writing notes whenever I needed help in communicating. I had initially used Tumaini, the head bursar, as a translator. Her method was to call up the other party on her cell phone and deliver my message in rapid-fire sentences at full volume. Not only did the poor ear on the other end get the message, so did everyone in the building. But Tumaini left for a week-long business meeting, and so I turned to Happy. Happy composed pithy messages in her head, I wrote them down, she explained each word, and then I put each note in my bright red pouch.
For the trip to the seamstress, Happy had thought of two sentences I would need. Also, she knew I would need to clarify that I wanted two pockets, and that the pockets should go inside (ndani) the seam. Finally we worked on how I would ask the seamstress when she’d be able to have the pockets done, which turned into a lesson on the seven days of the week.
So it was, I appeared at the whirring machine of the seamstress, bright fabric hanging above and a bright smile radiating from within her. I pulled out my scrap of paper from the red pouch, and in my best Swahili accent, I asked the first question dictated by Happy. And then I wondered why the bright smile vanished into thin air. And why didn’t she take the skirt from my hands and look at pocket possibilities? I looked down at the words thinking I’d mispronounced them, and then at the translation below: “When can you have it finished?” I slapped my paper over and read, “Please put pockets in my skirt,” the bright smile re-appearing. The rest of the transaction happened according to plan. Happy had given me all the right words.
Not only had Happy given me all the right words, my mother had given me the right advice, Alcyone had given me the pouch, the Nebraska Synod of the ELCA and SMMUCo had given me the job here in Tanzania, Midland Lutheran College had given me the year off to do it, and the Lord had given me the wisdom to recognize the radiance of a seamstress, dimmed only momentarily by linguistic confusion.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Rhythmically hard of hearing
Having attended two wedding receptions, I’ve decided my favorite part occurs at the beginning, or sort of beginning, after the guests have been waiting in the parking lot an hour or two for the wedding couple to arrive. Throughout town, a ten-piece brass band riding on the back of a pickup has blasted celebratory songs, leading a long train of cars. The wedding car, easily identified by an arrangement of roses and bows on the hood, parks at the entrance to the YMCA reception hall. The band now assemble themselves on the steps nearby, the bass and snare drums on one end, the trombones and trumpet on the other.
Unlike the police band of last week’s wedding, these musicians wear red satin shirts and black ties. They are a group much plumper than the police, and this band has energy. Before the trumpet player sounds the first note, he feels the beat in his body by swaying from side to side, closer to a bounce with loose hips. While he’s been swaying, his trumpet has been pressed to his lips and just at the right moment, music somersaults into the wedding air. The whole band now sways, loose hips and all, waiting for the right moment, instruments poised and ready. Their sounds tumble into the air, and I am giddy.
Now the women whoop, holler and form a line, dancing around the wedding car. The more sedate ones bounce from foot to foot, some add a bounce of the hip, and some put shoulders, hips, and shaking head into the rhythm.
I wish I could join them. For eight years, I studied piano. When I became proficient at breaking down measures into four beats, three beats, or some other variation, I couldn’t keep the same tempo. My teacher tapped the end of the piano with a pencil and counted out, “ONE AND TWO AND THREE AND FOUR AND.” In marching band, I listened for the bass drum’s downbeat, planting my right foot on a yard line in the football field in time with it. My feet learned how to make eight equal steps for every five yards, and I learned to listen for that bass drum.
At the wedding reception with hips and shoulders and dizzying music, I am bumping shoulders out of time with the woman next to me. I stop and watch. Clearly she feels the rhythm. I listen for the bass drum, the snare, and then each brass player. There’s not a downbeat to be found anywhere. All I can do is match my swaying visually to the trumpet player’s.
I remember a line from a book about the history of jazz that describes African rhythm, the seeds of jazz. In African drumming, syncopation layers upon syncopation. The intent is to mesmerize and disorient listeners, but not enough to alienate them. So, imagine a knot, and imagine that this knot is made up of six strands. Imagine that each of these strands has already formed a knot. Then imagine each of those knots has six strands that form a knot. Then imagine all of those knots have been looping around you. It’s impossible to follow them, yet you are the center of those knots.
Later at the wedding reception, I happily tapped my toe to popular recorded music with downbeats obvious and clear by Michael Jackson, Abba, and African artists I didn’t know. But this other music, this spell of silent downbeats that left me with the euphoria of having the bottom drop out, of floating with bouncing shoulders and swaying hips—that was intoxicating—sway, though I did, out of time.
Unlike the police band of last week’s wedding, these musicians wear red satin shirts and black ties. They are a group much plumper than the police, and this band has energy. Before the trumpet player sounds the first note, he feels the beat in his body by swaying from side to side, closer to a bounce with loose hips. While he’s been swaying, his trumpet has been pressed to his lips and just at the right moment, music somersaults into the wedding air. The whole band now sways, loose hips and all, waiting for the right moment, instruments poised and ready. Their sounds tumble into the air, and I am giddy.
Now the women whoop, holler and form a line, dancing around the wedding car. The more sedate ones bounce from foot to foot, some add a bounce of the hip, and some put shoulders, hips, and shaking head into the rhythm.
I wish I could join them. For eight years, I studied piano. When I became proficient at breaking down measures into four beats, three beats, or some other variation, I couldn’t keep the same tempo. My teacher tapped the end of the piano with a pencil and counted out, “ONE AND TWO AND THREE AND FOUR AND.” In marching band, I listened for the bass drum’s downbeat, planting my right foot on a yard line in the football field in time with it. My feet learned how to make eight equal steps for every five yards, and I learned to listen for that bass drum.
At the wedding reception with hips and shoulders and dizzying music, I am bumping shoulders out of time with the woman next to me. I stop and watch. Clearly she feels the rhythm. I listen for the bass drum, the snare, and then each brass player. There’s not a downbeat to be found anywhere. All I can do is match my swaying visually to the trumpet player’s.
I remember a line from a book about the history of jazz that describes African rhythm, the seeds of jazz. In African drumming, syncopation layers upon syncopation. The intent is to mesmerize and disorient listeners, but not enough to alienate them. So, imagine a knot, and imagine that this knot is made up of six strands. Imagine that each of these strands has already formed a knot. Then imagine each of those knots has six strands that form a knot. Then imagine all of those knots have been looping around you. It’s impossible to follow them, yet you are the center of those knots.
Later at the wedding reception, I happily tapped my toe to popular recorded music with downbeats obvious and clear by Michael Jackson, Abba, and African artists I didn’t know. But this other music, this spell of silent downbeats that left me with the euphoria of having the bottom drop out, of floating with bouncing shoulders and swaying hips—that was intoxicating—sway, though I did, out of time.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Water, hot and cold
At the college, the bursar’s office is directly below my apartment. When I first arrived here, Tumaini, the bursar, told me that if I wanted hot water for a bath, she would turn on the switch in her office to heat a huge metal tank hidden in her closet. The trickiest part was remembering to tell her to turn it off, which meant that when I forgot, the closet doors were also heated by morning. Soon I adjusted to that system.
In the following days, I studied the larger rhythms of campus life beyond my own. Mama Viktor and the cleaning crew began sweeping the sidewalks at 6:30 a.m.; Haji, the van driver, drove through the campus gate at 7:00 to collect college workers in Moshi Town, about a half hour away. By 8:00, Kimaro had served my breakfast, and at 11:00, the campus converged into the dining hall for tea.
All of these activities were stepped into high gear this past week when a conference of 95 parish workers and pastors arrived for four days. Tea in heavy kettles were rolled over to the group at the chapel. For meals, colorful linens had been unfurled over the tables, place settings arranged, and goats roasted.
In the evening Mama Viktor and the cleaning crew were still on campus. At 8:30 p.m. I noticed they had been heating water in a huge vat over an open fire behind the chapel. Soon I saw two of the crew (all women) carry between them large buckets of steaming water from the fire to the dorms, where the guests were staying; then another two women, and then the first two women returning with another bucket. At this point, they couldn’t carry the steaming bucket without stopping to rest a time or two.
It wasn’t until later I learned they were providing hot water for the guests to bathe. The single water heater on campus leads to my apartment only.
In the following days, I studied the larger rhythms of campus life beyond my own. Mama Viktor and the cleaning crew began sweeping the sidewalks at 6:30 a.m.; Haji, the van driver, drove through the campus gate at 7:00 to collect college workers in Moshi Town, about a half hour away. By 8:00, Kimaro had served my breakfast, and at 11:00, the campus converged into the dining hall for tea.
All of these activities were stepped into high gear this past week when a conference of 95 parish workers and pastors arrived for four days. Tea in heavy kettles were rolled over to the group at the chapel. For meals, colorful linens had been unfurled over the tables, place settings arranged, and goats roasted.
In the evening Mama Viktor and the cleaning crew were still on campus. At 8:30 p.m. I noticed they had been heating water in a huge vat over an open fire behind the chapel. Soon I saw two of the crew (all women) carry between them large buckets of steaming water from the fire to the dorms, where the guests were staying; then another two women, and then the first two women returning with another bucket. At this point, they couldn’t carry the steaming bucket without stopping to rest a time or two.
It wasn’t until later I learned they were providing hot water for the guests to bathe. The single water heater on campus leads to my apartment only.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Not Going to a Wedding
My dear friend and colleague Allyson Backstrom, professor of chemistry at Midland Lutheran College, says it’s neither wise nor intelligent to make conclusions based on one-point data sets. But I’m no scientist; I’m a dreamer. I can conclude all kinds of things based on a one-time occurrence. And like any dreamy fool, I’ll announce my conclusions and wait for further clarification.
Based on a wedding that occurred this past Saturday, I’ve arrived at my Theory of Relativity of Organized Time in Tanzania: often—but not always—organized time known as a schedule is fluid and organic here. It follows naturally that I might or might not have attended that wedding.
The invitation came to me as a general announcement at 11:00 a.m. tea on Friday. This brings me to my first law of organized time: the Constancy of Tea, which says that eleven o’clock tea is constant and never changes during the work week. All office workers and faculty abandon their desks; John, the security guard leaves his post at the gate as do the plumber and electrician who moments earlier were sitting at a bench talking to John; Mama Victor and her cleaning crew set their mops against a wall, and I race out of my apartment. All converge at 11:00 to the dining hall where boiled tea in a heavy kettle waits for us with a large bowl of half-cakes.
On Friday 11:00 tea, Mr. Priva stood up and reminded everyone, first in Swahili then in English, that a lecturer at our college named Gidion was getting married. Mr. Priva came over to my table to make sure I understood that the college van would leave at 1:00 p.m. We repeated 1:00 p.m. several times. I understood, he understood, 1:00 p.m.
At 1:00 p.m. Saturday I stood in front of the main campus building where the only ones to show up besides me were two mockingbirds. At about 1:15, two young men appeared on the front steps, both in non-wedding jeans. After they exchanged a few words, one of them asked me where I was going. I said I’d shown up for the wedding, repeated “wedding” in Swahili. It turns out, one of them was the van driver hired to take us to the wedding and the other his friend. I asked where the others were. “Ah, this is African time,” the friend said. “We never come on time.”
Since I was the only to show, they decided it was a good time for tea.
This brings me to my next law in the Theory of Relativity of Organized Time in Tanzania: when something doesn’t happen according to schedule, it’s a good time for tea.
At the insistence of the van driver and his friend (“Please, come with us, Madam!”), I followed them to the men’s dormitory. It wasn’t as though I’d miss the van. The van driver introduced himself as Haji, the English-speaking friend was Hassan, and I was Jeanne whose head was full of thoughts about the impropriety of fraternizing with students and van drivers in a men’s dorm room. In Haji’s cramped room, I sat on the only desk chair, the other two stood beside me at the desk against the wall. I ate one boiled egg and the other two split the second boiled egg, and we all drank tea and ate half-cakes. As Haji cleaned up our dishes in the washroom, Hassan sat on the lower bunk of one bed with his head bent forward by the upper bunk, explaining to me that he was a frustrated author. I gave him some tips, and by 2:20 p.m. we were back at the main campus building where I discovered that the assistant to the bursar, Happy, was waiting for us. It’s always a good sign when Happy is waiting for you, as opposed to mockingbirds.
On the way to Moshi Town, I learned that the wedding started at 1:00 p.m. Our first stop though, was not at the church but downtown Moshi where we parked and found the secretary to the provost, Mama Cate, with her hair in curlers. After Mama Cate and Happy talked for a bit in Swahili, they urged me to go with Mama Cate to the hair dressers, Happy would go home and get ready for the wedding, and we would meet back at some point. It was 3:00 at this point, and if the wedding had really started at 1:00 p.m., surely it would be over. (I later learned that it ended at about 4:00.)
At the hair dresser’s, I sat on a chair with one of those hair dryer domes that I avoided by sitting closer to the chair’s edge, my head bent forward by the dome. The shop’s proprietor sat at the far end of the room on a stool. Between her legs another woman sat on the floor handing strands of fake copper-colored hair to the proprietor who braided them into endless rows along the scalp. Bits of black hair littered the floor along with paper and plastic packaging and a roll of black yarn that the only male hair dresser was using to tie up hair and secure an extended length of false hair. He also used a lot of goo to form complex curls in what looked like a gift-wrap bow.
Apparently—to my lack of surprise—no one had made an appointment. The room was crowded with people waiting. Occasionally someone walked in from the street with a plastic bag stuffed with wrinkled clothes. She pulled one out and held it up for those waiting under a dryer or on a couch or large stuffed chair. When one woman held up her hand, the merchant casually tossed the blouse to her and continued unpacking her merchandize.
At about 4:15 I followed Mama Cate out of the salon, her hair coiffed into a French knot, a strand of curled hair spiraling down from one temple. We stood by the Leopard Hotel and waited for Haji, Happy, and the van. (Hassan had left earlier.) Mama Cate made several calls to Haji who assured Mama Cate he was almost there.
This brings me to my next law of the Theory of Relativity of Organized Time in Tanzania: “almost there” means “not there.” It has no reference to time. I had a professor like this in graduate school. It was her way of encouraging me to keep going and not worry about the end, whatever the end may be. I think that definition works for Tanzania also.
About 20 minutes later, Haji really was there. Then it was time not to go to the wedding again, but to Mama Cate’s house so she could finish dressing. At Mama Cate’s house, I met many of her family, who came in an out of the living room where I watched what looked like a Tanzanian revival meeting on TV.
At 5:00, we arrived at the reception hall. We waited one hour for the wedding car to arrive and another hour for the wedding couple to enter the reception. But for most of the college folks, this was the real wedding, the thing worth attending. By 9:30 that night, the wedding attendants had sung and danced around the wedding car accompanied by a ten-piece brass band, and we’d waved our wedding handkerchiefs in rhythm to the brass band. The roasted goat, mouth stuffed with folded banana leaves, had danced along the red carpet on a rolling cart. The bride and groom had fed each other and their parents, and the guests had danced up the red carpet to offer gifts and shake hands with the bride and groom. Finally back at my apartment, my head literally hit the pillow.
I never saw Mr. Priva that day. One o’clock indeed.
Based on a wedding that occurred this past Saturday, I’ve arrived at my Theory of Relativity of Organized Time in Tanzania: often—but not always—organized time known as a schedule is fluid and organic here. It follows naturally that I might or might not have attended that wedding.
The invitation came to me as a general announcement at 11:00 a.m. tea on Friday. This brings me to my first law of organized time: the Constancy of Tea, which says that eleven o’clock tea is constant and never changes during the work week. All office workers and faculty abandon their desks; John, the security guard leaves his post at the gate as do the plumber and electrician who moments earlier were sitting at a bench talking to John; Mama Victor and her cleaning crew set their mops against a wall, and I race out of my apartment. All converge at 11:00 to the dining hall where boiled tea in a heavy kettle waits for us with a large bowl of half-cakes.
On Friday 11:00 tea, Mr. Priva stood up and reminded everyone, first in Swahili then in English, that a lecturer at our college named Gidion was getting married. Mr. Priva came over to my table to make sure I understood that the college van would leave at 1:00 p.m. We repeated 1:00 p.m. several times. I understood, he understood, 1:00 p.m.
At 1:00 p.m. Saturday I stood in front of the main campus building where the only ones to show up besides me were two mockingbirds. At about 1:15, two young men appeared on the front steps, both in non-wedding jeans. After they exchanged a few words, one of them asked me where I was going. I said I’d shown up for the wedding, repeated “wedding” in Swahili. It turns out, one of them was the van driver hired to take us to the wedding and the other his friend. I asked where the others were. “Ah, this is African time,” the friend said. “We never come on time.”
Since I was the only to show, they decided it was a good time for tea.
This brings me to my next law in the Theory of Relativity of Organized Time in Tanzania: when something doesn’t happen according to schedule, it’s a good time for tea.
At the insistence of the van driver and his friend (“Please, come with us, Madam!”), I followed them to the men’s dormitory. It wasn’t as though I’d miss the van. The van driver introduced himself as Haji, the English-speaking friend was Hassan, and I was Jeanne whose head was full of thoughts about the impropriety of fraternizing with students and van drivers in a men’s dorm room. In Haji’s cramped room, I sat on the only desk chair, the other two stood beside me at the desk against the wall. I ate one boiled egg and the other two split the second boiled egg, and we all drank tea and ate half-cakes. As Haji cleaned up our dishes in the washroom, Hassan sat on the lower bunk of one bed with his head bent forward by the upper bunk, explaining to me that he was a frustrated author. I gave him some tips, and by 2:20 p.m. we were back at the main campus building where I discovered that the assistant to the bursar, Happy, was waiting for us. It’s always a good sign when Happy is waiting for you, as opposed to mockingbirds.
On the way to Moshi Town, I learned that the wedding started at 1:00 p.m. Our first stop though, was not at the church but downtown Moshi where we parked and found the secretary to the provost, Mama Cate, with her hair in curlers. After Mama Cate and Happy talked for a bit in Swahili, they urged me to go with Mama Cate to the hair dressers, Happy would go home and get ready for the wedding, and we would meet back at some point. It was 3:00 at this point, and if the wedding had really started at 1:00 p.m., surely it would be over. (I later learned that it ended at about 4:00.)
At the hair dresser’s, I sat on a chair with one of those hair dryer domes that I avoided by sitting closer to the chair’s edge, my head bent forward by the dome. The shop’s proprietor sat at the far end of the room on a stool. Between her legs another woman sat on the floor handing strands of fake copper-colored hair to the proprietor who braided them into endless rows along the scalp. Bits of black hair littered the floor along with paper and plastic packaging and a roll of black yarn that the only male hair dresser was using to tie up hair and secure an extended length of false hair. He also used a lot of goo to form complex curls in what looked like a gift-wrap bow.
Apparently—to my lack of surprise—no one had made an appointment. The room was crowded with people waiting. Occasionally someone walked in from the street with a plastic bag stuffed with wrinkled clothes. She pulled one out and held it up for those waiting under a dryer or on a couch or large stuffed chair. When one woman held up her hand, the merchant casually tossed the blouse to her and continued unpacking her merchandize.
At about 4:15 I followed Mama Cate out of the salon, her hair coiffed into a French knot, a strand of curled hair spiraling down from one temple. We stood by the Leopard Hotel and waited for Haji, Happy, and the van. (Hassan had left earlier.) Mama Cate made several calls to Haji who assured Mama Cate he was almost there.
This brings me to my next law of the Theory of Relativity of Organized Time in Tanzania: “almost there” means “not there.” It has no reference to time. I had a professor like this in graduate school. It was her way of encouraging me to keep going and not worry about the end, whatever the end may be. I think that definition works for Tanzania also.
About 20 minutes later, Haji really was there. Then it was time not to go to the wedding again, but to Mama Cate’s house so she could finish dressing. At Mama Cate’s house, I met many of her family, who came in an out of the living room where I watched what looked like a Tanzanian revival meeting on TV.
At 5:00, we arrived at the reception hall. We waited one hour for the wedding car to arrive and another hour for the wedding couple to enter the reception. But for most of the college folks, this was the real wedding, the thing worth attending. By 9:30 that night, the wedding attendants had sung and danced around the wedding car accompanied by a ten-piece brass band, and we’d waved our wedding handkerchiefs in rhythm to the brass band. The roasted goat, mouth stuffed with folded banana leaves, had danced along the red carpet on a rolling cart. The bride and groom had fed each other and their parents, and the guests had danced up the red carpet to offer gifts and shake hands with the bride and groom. Finally back at my apartment, my head literally hit the pillow.
I never saw Mr. Priva that day. One o’clock indeed.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Taking a walk at SMMUCo
At the entrance of Stefano Moshi Memorial University College (SMMUCo, pronounced “SeeMOOco”), a large yellow gate stands between the campus and the road. After I pass through the gate and greet John, the security guard, I can either go left—an uphill climb—or go right, downhill. Either way, the road is a red dust that coats the corn stalks and banana leaves, and I think to myself that corn stalks and banana leaves deserve to be clean and green. If I had a water hose, I would spray them to their proper green. As buses rush by, pedestrians fling themselves against the side of the road, billows of red dust swirl and settle, and then I know that I have just become a banana leaf.
Since I am the only Caucasian on the road, passersby often stare without any attempt at subtlety. School children call out, “Good morning, Madam!” or “Good evening, Madam!” Three little ones tiptoe beside me for a good bit of the way, staring and listening in eerie silence for any behavior from me that might offer insight into the species of English-speaking madams. Later, teenagers, who walk in swarms, rush across the road to greet me. One gives me a high-five and throws her head back, laughing hysterically.
As for the older, more sedate folk, I greet them and they return my greeting with something I’ve never heard of, so I suspect our conversations could be translated like this:
Jeanne: Hello, Madam! (“Hujambo, Mama!”)
Other person: Hello! It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?
Jeanne: Thank you. Welcome! Teacher! SMMUCo!
By the end of the walk, I am swirling with call-and-nonsensical-responses. When a VW bus stuffed with passengers roars by, one man thrusts his torso out the window and hollers, “Sorry, Madam! We have no more room for you!”
I throw my hands up in the air and yell in my best Swahili, “No!” After the red dust settles once again, I am still laughing hysterically.
Since I am the only Caucasian on the road, passersby often stare without any attempt at subtlety. School children call out, “Good morning, Madam!” or “Good evening, Madam!” Three little ones tiptoe beside me for a good bit of the way, staring and listening in eerie silence for any behavior from me that might offer insight into the species of English-speaking madams. Later, teenagers, who walk in swarms, rush across the road to greet me. One gives me a high-five and throws her head back, laughing hysterically.
As for the older, more sedate folk, I greet them and they return my greeting with something I’ve never heard of, so I suspect our conversations could be translated like this:
Jeanne: Hello, Madam! (“Hujambo, Mama!”)
Other person: Hello! It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?
Jeanne: Thank you. Welcome! Teacher! SMMUCo!
By the end of the walk, I am swirling with call-and-nonsensical-responses. When a VW bus stuffed with passengers roars by, one man thrusts his torso out the window and hollers, “Sorry, Madam! We have no more room for you!”
I throw my hands up in the air and yell in my best Swahili, “No!” After the red dust settles once again, I am still laughing hysterically.
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